Mich. Right-to-Work Law Results in Mass Exodus of Home Caretakers from Union

What can we extrapolate about
the state of unionized labor in America when 80 percent of one
group’s members dropped out in a single year once presented the
opportunity to do so?

That’s what happened in Michigan. That hard-fought right-to-work
law gave home healthcare workers the chance to choose whether
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) would actually
represent them. Home healthcare workers, who are often family
members of the patients they serve and sometimes not even actually
paid, were forced by the state beginning in 2005 to accept SEIU as
their bargaining representative and pay them dues, which were
deducted from state Medicaid checks for the people the workers were
serving.

Now that Michigan workers have been granted the right to refuse
union representation and decline to pay union does, the home care
workers are showing SEIU Healthcare Michigan the door. According to
federal reports examined by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for
Public Policy, 44,000 home care
workers have dropped their membership from the union, leaving
just under 11,000 members.

Fox News interviewed a couple who had been forced into the
union while caring for their own children and had little good to
say about their membership. The husband is a retired Detroit police
officer. How bad do you have to be to lose them?

[Patricia] Haynes said that every month, $30 was deducted from
their children’s Medicare payments, and, while it did not break
their bank, they objected on principle.

“They couldn’t get me a raise, they couldn’t get me more
vacation time and they certainly did nothing to improve my
children’s care,” she said. “I’d hate to say it, but in my opinion,
they were stealing.”

Haynes also says that they are also hoping to help others who
had to pay dues.

“We are not anti-union. I just don’t understand why we were
forced to join because I have two disabled kids,” she said. “That
we were told that we had to join a union just because we chose to
keep our kids at home to care for them.”

The Mackinac Center calculates that SEIU has skimmed more than
$34 million from the Medicaid payments across the state and will
lose more than $4 million in annual dues and fees from the plunge
in membership. The Mackinac Center is suing to try to get some of
those dues the union has already taken back.

Michigan isn’t the only state that has forced caretakers into
accepting union representation, and similar requirements in
Illinois have led to a Supreme Court case. The court heard
arguments for and against forced caretaker unionization in
Harris v. Quinn in January. I wrote a summary of the case

here, and SCOTUSblog attended and analyzed the arguments
presented to the court
here. We’re still waiting on the decision.