For over 20 years, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has been exempt from property taxes as a supposedly non-profit charity. Despite its status, the “$10 billion integrated global health enterprise” can be described as anything but charitable, and Pittsburgh’s working class is beginning to fight back against UPMC’s exploitation of the city.
Since the collapse of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has faced difficulty adjusting to a population that has been more than halved, from a peak of 700,000 to 300,000 today, resulting in a tax base that has contracted significantly. Under the current economic crisis the city has grown more impoverished.
While the city faces school closures, layoffs, deteriorating roads and bridges, and recurrent and deeper cuts to public transportation—which many of UPMC’s workers rely upon to go to work—the health care giant throws the city crumbs while staunchly refusing to be taxed. The tax-exempt status of the city’s largest employer has shifted the tax burden onto the working class.
UPMC employs millionaire executives while it pays its workers so little that many have to rely on food stamps—going so far as to organize a food bank for its employees during the holiday season. Raises can be as low as two cents an hour per year.
Clearly displaying the insanity of the capitalist health care system, UPMC’s doctors and hospitals accept only their own insurance plan, refusing to accept insurance plans from “competitors,” contributing to rising health care costs. It has closed hospitals and clinics in low-income neighborhoods like Braddock, laying off workers and leaving the community without service, in order to grab up more tax-exempt land in the suburbs and become more competitive.
Now the city’s biggest landowner is struggling to maintain its tax-exempt privilege. Displaying unmitigated arrogance, UPMC is counter-suing the city of Pittsburgh claiming “unconstitutional discrimination” in violation of the 14th amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act! At the same time, UPMC workers who are struggling to organize a union with Service Employees International Union to fight for better wages, benefits, and working conditions are facing threats, firings, and other sabotage tactics.
Pittsburgh residents, community organizations, elected officials, and unions including SEIU, United Food and Commercial Workers, the Amalgamated Transit Union and United Steelworkers are coming together in the Make It Our UPMC campaign. The majority of Pittsburghers believe that the health care giant should lose its tax-free privilege, and growing protests and rallies show that the struggle is reaching a new level. The community has had enough of UPMC’s exploitative relationship and is taking to the streets to get justice.
