|
|
|
|
|
Huge door-to-door campaign underway to unionize Home Help workers April 16, 2025 The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is going all out to unionize Home Help workers. I first wrote about this last November. I said then that the problem with unionizing Home Help workers is that there is no single employer. The employer is the elderly or disabled person who needs the help, so there are 35,000 of them in Michigan and a good share of them are adult children taking care of elderly parents or parents taking care of disabled children. (Here is the Home Help Program Handbook) How does a union conduct collective bargaining with 35,000 employers? The solution was to come up with a pretend employer. Legislation passed last September (Public Act 144) made the director of the Department of Health and Human Services that employer, but "solely for purposes of collective bargaining". For a union to be recognized as the representative of a group of employees, it must be the choice of the majority of those employees. This majority may be determined in two ways. One is an election. In an election, the "majority" is of employees who vote, which means that if only 60% of employees vote, the union wins with yes votes from 30% of employees. The other way is voluntary recognition from the employer. If the employer is persuaded that 50% of the employees are in favor of the union, the employer can skip the election and recognize the union. All this is explained in this document from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC), starting on page 11. SEIU is going door-to-door passing out literature and asking Home Help workers to sign a "request for exclusive representation." They are asking the person to sign an online form brought up on a mobile phone. You can see it here. One Home Help worker tells me she was told that they have a goal of 12,000 signatures and they currently have 8,000. Since many Home Help workers will refuse to sign, they will have to visit maybe half again as many homes to get 12,000 signatures. Going to the homes of 18,000 Home Help workers must be an enormous operation. I find it hard to believe that an effort that size is for the benefit of the Home Help workers and not for the revenue SEIU will get from union dues. The online sign-up form says that dues will be deducted from paychecks at a rate of 2.5%, limited to $55 a month. $55 a month from 35,000 Home Help workers comes to $1,925,000 a month for the SEIU. Here's what the online Request for Exclusive Representation says about dues:
Another reason I think this all for the benefit of the SEIU is that pay rates for Home Help workers are set by the legislature. Since Public Act 14 says “Nothing in this act is intended to curtail or infringe on the legislature’s constitutional appropriation authority,” any increase in pay rates agreed to in collective bargaining is not likely to be realized. Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com or call or text me at 517-730-2638. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.
|
