The Washington Examiner‘s Sean Higgins has an important piece up today about how thousands of Minnesotans who care for disabled and indigent family members are trying to remove a parasite from their lives — the Service Employees International Union. For more than two years now, the SEIU has been skimming from the benefit checks of their home-bound loved ones, in exchange for nothing at all. They’d like to end the arrangement that was made possible by a Democratic governor’s sweetheart deal and an election that many of them never knew about.
A version of this same benefit-skimming scam has been attempted in several states, and was at one point common enough that the U.S. Supreme Court stepped into limit its scope.
To see how the scam works, here’s the short version of how it started in Michigan: Tens of thousands of people in the Great Lakes State receive Medicaid funds to care for homebound or otherwise invalid and low-income family members who require in-home care. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, acted to help the unions in her state get in on the money. First, she recognized these care workers as employees of a quasi-government agency known as the Michigan Quality Community Care Council. This employer was set up for the sole purpose of unionizing all of the workers in one shot as a bargaining unit.
These workers would not get any more money or any of the benefits of government employment (a pension, for example), but they would become eligible to be forced into joining a government union and paying it dues. The union could not even bargain for higher pay or different work conditions for them, but it could take part of the money that was intended to pay for poor sick people’s care.
Union organizers then staged a little-publicized unionization election. Even though only 6,300 of the 56,442 home care workers participated in the election, that was enough to force all of them into joining a local chapter of the SEIU that had been formed for the sole purpose of taking their money for free, without providing them any of the benefits of union membership that you would think of.
This is what truly makes the story cry out to heaven. It’s simple theft.
This scam lasted from 2009 to 2014 in Michigan, netting the SEIU millions per year for doing nothing. When Michigan’s right-to-work law finally gave the victims the option of simply quitting the union, 80 percent of them did so immediately. Democratic governors in Illinois and Pennsylvania tried to victimize their own indigent residents in the same way, the latter with an executive order that is still being litigated.
After the Illinois scam was shut down in the June 2014 Supreme Court decision Harris v. Quinn, the unions were forced to acquire money from their victims through an opt-in process only. This had become the rule by the time Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, created a similar sweetheart arrangement for the SEIU in his state in 2014, but some of the forced members still claim their dues are being deducted without their consent.
As in Michigan, the Minnesota union was created in a poorly publicized, low-turnout election, in which just 5,800 of nearly 30,000 home healthcare workers voted. Many of the newly minted union members claim they were deceived by union organizers into signing documents they would not have signed otherwise. In one case, Higgins notes, the union actually admitted to a victim that a signature gatherer had forged their signature. But this appears to have happened in more cases, according to several victims of this scam.
The current effort by activists to gather signatures to decertify the Minnesota union has also raised questions about the legitimacy of the unionization election, similar to questions that had been raised in Illinois. Several of the supposed home care workers who were sent ballots in 2014 turn out, when approached to sign a decertification petition, not to have been home care workers at all. Some had dummy addresses such as vacant lots and gas stations.
In the end, this scam seems like a last gasp by labor unions to remain on the map in an era when they are shrinking and the honest way of gaining new members and organizing them seems to failing as their number of members dwindles.
The unions face a true moral problem here. People can and often do defend their advocacy on behalf of American workers, but this isn’t the typical case in which political lines are drawn. Rather, it is a full-blown system of graft that comes at the expense of poor people, so completely indefensible that it should call all of the unions’ motivations in all of their other activities into question.
