UNIONS SUCK!!!

Every once and while there’s something that comes along that can be considered, by many, as being a bit of good news. And in this particular instance that good news stems from the fact that more than 80 percent of workers who care for the home-bound elderly and disabled in Michigan have now seen fit to ditch that much beloved organization, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They decided to do so after the union was banned from taking mandatory dues out of assistance checks.

The "dues skim" ended in 2013, but not before the SEIU had managed to steal more than $34 Million from the Medicaid checks of the workers' patients, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reported Wednesday. Most of these ‘workers’ were actually relatives or friends of their home-bound patients. Which to my way of thinking, makes the taking of these ‘dues’ all the more unseemly. I would argue that unions today, or very few of them, any longer serve any kind of a useful purpose.

According to the union's filing with the federal Department of Labor, 44,347 home-based caregivers have decided to reject union membership -- "virtually all of the long-term home-based caregivers affected by the dues skim," the Center reported. It then went on to say, "It also is more than 80 percent of the 55,265 members the union claimed to have at the end on 2012." Many people today have come recognize that unions for what they are, simply put they are the thug division of the Democrat Party.

Ted O'Neil, a spokesman for the Mackinac Center, said in a recent interview that plummeting SEIU membership is a sign that forced unionization of home healthcare workers wasn't what they wanted. He said, "All 44,000 of those caregivers who were originally forced into the union are free to go back and join." He went on to say, "It's very telling of what worker freedom means to people." Folks have a tendency to get very tired of handing over more and more of their hard earned money to these union crooks!

The dues-skimming ‘scheme’ was set up in 2006, after the SEIU identified home-based healthcare workers as a potential revenue source, the Center reported; the workers were mailed union election ballots. But the Center noted some workers never got the ballots and were unaware of what happened. The scheme was exposed by the Mackinac Center and abolished soon after Democrat Gov. Jennifer Granholm left office. As everyone knows very well, Democrats are big union supporters.

And also on a positive note, the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation has now filed legal action in the attempt to get back some of the dues; the case is pending, the Center said. Michigan passed right-to-work legislation in 2012, effectively bringing to an end the era of mandatory unionization. "Not only does this show that the stealth unionization that led to the SEIU dues skim was wrong, but it also calls attention to just how important right-to-work is for Michigan," O'Neil said.

I think most of us will be able to safely agree that the unions we have today bear very little resemblance to the unions of yesteryear when there was actually some benefit to be had by the worker who belonged to one. It seems that today unions have morphed into what are essentially nothing more than revenue raisers for the Democrat Party. And too, it’s these public sector unions, working in concert with Democrat politicians, that have helped to create what has become a fiscal mess in many of our cities and states.