Excerpt from Health Programs in Collective Bargaining

Records indicate that the first collective bargaining agreement to provide for non - occupational sickness and accident benefits was negotiated as early as 1926, but the new trend did not emerge clearly before World War II. During the war, the wage stabilization policies of the War Labor Board effectively restricted union bar gaining for simple across - the - board wage increases even when employers were ready to grant them. Most health insurance plans negotiated during the war were the result of efforts to discover benefits in lieu of wages which the War Labor Board would approve and which would have an obvious value for workers in dollars and cents and in improved morale. Paid vacations and paid holidays were the most popular of these wage-substitute demands. They were widely established by the end of the war in union-management contracts. Health insurance was never as common an item in negotiations. The Board never seriously considered disapproving these insurance arrangements, when agreed to by both parties, but it did not order their inclusion in contracts in disputed cases.

Consequently, during the war the government made no official determination of the status of health insurance among collective bargaining demands. The question arose again under the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947. In the early fall of 1948 a us. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a National Labor Relations Board ruling requiring an employer to bargain on pension plans. The court held that the terms wages and other conditions of employment as used in the collective bargaining provisions of the Act clearly include pension and retirement funds. In April, 1949, the us. Supreme Court declined to review the above-mentioned decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals. The nlrb, in another case, ruled that group health insurance plans also fall within the meaning of these terms.

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