Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Supermarket Workers Strike, 10/27/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec03/strike_10-27.html

Initiating Questions:

1. As a student, who pays for your health care?

2. How do unemployed people pay for medical care?

3. How much do you think employees at your local grocery store are paid?

4. Why do employee unions exist?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Why did the striking workers walk out of their jobs?

Among other things, the workers - 70,000 strong - are protesting the desire by major grocery chains such as Albertsons, Ralph's and Safeway to make employees contribute to rising medical benefit costs.

2. According to the article, what is a problem facing employers nationwide?

Health care costs are on the rise everywhere, forcing companies to make decisions about how to balance the expense of keeping workers covered while at the same time keeping them happy. Some health care economists - and many insurance companies - argue that generous coverage has given Americans and their doctors a perverse incentive to indulge in wasteful consumption of expensive drugs and tests.

The only way to control spending, they say, is to expose consumers to the true costs of health care.

3. What part of their health care benefits are the California workers currently responsible for?

In California, supermarket employees make an average of $12 to $14 per hour and contribute no money to their medical benefits.

4. How is Wal-Mart involved in this strike?

The grocery chain executives argue that they have to pass some of the cost on to workers to survive the challenge posed by their largest competitor: Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, which pays its employees about 25 to 30 percent less than most grocers and does not have unions to fight for employee rights, plans to build 40 new superstores in Southern California by 2009.

5. Why does Wal-Mart have an advantage over other grocery stores?

As the nation's largest private employer, Wal-Mart can bargain for lower prices from suppliers. In addition, only about half of Wal-Mart's roughly 1 million employees are in a company health plan, according Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart vice president. Many are ineligible for health care benefits because they were hired too recently.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Should representatives from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union agree to pay something toward health care? Or should the grocery stores continue to pay for their workers' medical care as a benefit of employment?

2. Should candidates running for president in 2004 address health care issues? Research some of the Democratic candidate health care plans-- Do any of them address the problems in the health care system?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.