As Donald Trump returns to the White House this week, the people that Capital & Main has covered for the last 18 months in its national series on worker organizing could face a difficult transition. This is the third in a four-part series looking at how labor organizing could be affected by the second Trump administration.
Industry
Medicare and Affordable Care Act Call center workers on federal contracts.
Number of Workers
12,000
What They’re Fighting For
A starting wage of $25/hour, better health insurance, and breaks between calls.
Backstory
The workers who answer calls for 1-800 Medicare and Healthcare.gov insurance exchanges have been organizing for a union at Maximus Inc. since 2017, part of a workforce of 12,000 customer service representatives at 12 worksites. Wages for workers start at $17.75, far beneath living wages, and workers say their health insurance is too expensive to use.
Eileen Rivera, Maximus vice president of public relations and communications, told Capital & Main that wages are set by federal law under the Service Contract Act. That is true for “minimum monetary compensation,” but the act does not ban contractors from paying higher wages, though doing so can lower profit margins.
To pressure Maximus for changes, workers have staged six short-term strikes amidst what they call a union-busting campaign waged by Maximus. They have filed 24 unfair labor practice complaints alleging surveillance, threats of retaliation and other anti-union efforts with the National Labor Relations Board; 11 remain open. They also built alliances with several congressional representatives, and urged the Biden administration to make good on its “good jobs principles” and declaration of support for good labor practices at federal contractors.”
Last May, workers thought they had finally scored a win: Officials at the contracting agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), announced a rebid of Maximus’ $6.6 billion, nine-year contract in order to add a “labor harmony” requirement. Under that provision, workers could trade an agreement not to strike for concessions from Maximus — most notably a commitment to remain neutral to a union drive.
Current Status
Maximus sued to stop the rebid in the U.S. Court of Claims on Nov. 1, calling the labor harmony provision “a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of labor unions.” On an earnings call on Nov. 21, two weeks after the presidential election, Maximus CEO Bruce Caswell told investors the provision was “unnecessary, inappropriate and illegal.” On Nov. 26, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services retracted the rebid and, with it, the labor harmony provision.
Maximus is “pleased with the outcome,” said Rivera.
A CMS spokesperson declined to address the decision directly, instead highlighting the agency’s commitment to providing “accurate, timely and understandable information.”
For workers, said Anna Flemmings, who works in Maximus’ call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, “It was a blow.” Flemmings has worked at the call center for eight years and currently earns $19.53 hourly. The MIT living wage calculator lists a living wage for a single parent of one child in Hattiesburg as $31.98.
Coming Soon
Workers and their supporters say they are not backing down — even if the Department of Health and Human Services did.
“What happened here was an unwillingness of HHS to muscle back [at] Maximus,” said Celine McNicholas, director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s a bad precedent and, frankly, a betrayal of that workforce not to have fought the fight — instead to be held hostage by this firm to the tune of $6 billion in taxpayer funding. It’s a failure over years.”
In Mississippi, Flemmings and her colleagues are continuing to organize. “This will not deter us from our fight to unionize,” she said.
Why It Matters
Maximus workers are among the roughly 5 million workers in the privatized federal workforce, which observers predict will grow under a second Trump administration. The first Trump administration froze hiring in many federal departments, but doubled spending on “temporary help services” from 2016-2018.
“You shrink the federal workforce, you [then] increase the growth of a ‘shadow’ workforce — the federal contractors,” leading to “a federal contract workforce, but one without [labor] standards,” said Shahrzad Habibi, research and policy director at In the Public Interest, a think tank studying privatization. “That could be a scary thing.”
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