Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (32 page)

States generally formed a commission, or a government shell entity, to serve as the “employer of record” for the independent care providers.
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If these government shell entities remind you of shell companies that enabled the Enron accounting scandal, you are not far off. This is a legal fiction designed to paper over a union power play. It is cooking the government books. But of course, it’s never a problem when the government cooks its own books.

Once this commission or shell entity was in place, providers were then considered “employees” of this entity.
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The workers could be unionized and the unions could avail themselves of both dues checkoff and forced-dues collection if legal in that state. Thereafter, the fictitious employer would also sit on the other side of the table from the union in any negotiations.
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How did unions figure out these clever legal fictions to make independent care providers into fake government workers? They used lawyers, of course, and one in particular—Craig Becker, SEIU former counsel and Andy Stern’s go-to guy on complex legal machinations.
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Becker is no schlub—he is a Yale College and Yale Law School educated super-union lawyer and was the legal mastermind behind the SEIU’s plan to unionize the world. The radical founder of the discredited and disbanded political organization ACORN, Wade Rathke, praised Becker for “crafting and executing the legal strategies and protections which have allowed the effective organization of informal workers.”
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Becker’s writings indicate he has lots of other creative plans for advancing the interests of labor unions. Becker wants to take away workers’ rights to vote for “no union” in elections to unionize their workplace; that way, workers will only be able to choose which union will represent them, not whether they want to be unionized at all.
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Becker also wants to use National Labor Relations Board rule making and decisions to implement pro-labor “reforms” rather than actually changing our nation’s laws through a vote of Congress.
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Becker had so many good ideas that President Obama appointed him to his Presidential Transition Team when he got elected. Then, he appointed Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), where Becker would have a chance to tilt the playing field in favor of unions himself. President Obama appointed Becker to the NLRB in a controversial “recess appointment” when Congress was out of session. Apparently, Becker was far too radical to be confirmed by Congress. Then, President Obama pulled his nomination of Becker in late 2011 because Congress was unwilling to approve him.
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Becker still managed to serve on the NLRB for a year and a half under his recess appointment and probably accomplished quite a lot of mischief there during his tenure.
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Becker’s clever legal structuring led to increases in union membership of “perhaps a half-million such workers” and untold millions in new dues income for the SEIU.
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What does the union do for its dues income? It lobbies the legislature on behalf of the providers for increased payments and other improvements for the care providers. But in many cases, the union scheme actually reduces the amount of money available to the elderly, disabled, and poor families that receive assistance under the government programs.

Let’s take the example of a mother who serves as a “personal assistant” to her adult disabled son and has been unionized in Illinois. Before the unionization drive, her son received a subsidy from the government that he could use to pay for care or other expenses—say $1,000 a month. Because the son required personal care, his mother forgoes other employment to act as his “personal assistant” and uses his subsidy to defray the cost of his care. His subsidy doesn’t cover all the expenses of caring for her son or all of her hours taking care of him, but the $1,000 helps the family stay afloat.

But one day, Mom is told she is now part of a labor union and that her dues will be automatically deducted from the government subsidy. This means that the family’s subsidy for care of their disabled son is now reduced by union dues—say $95 per month, the current dues rate for care providers in Washington State.
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This simply reduces the amount of money the family has to take care of their disabled son by $95 a month and gives it to the union.

Many other “benefits” that unions lobby for help the union more than the care providers they represent. A perfect example is that unions often demand “training opportunities” for providers—but this training is provided by the union.
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So whether or not providers themselves actually want or benefit from the training, the union receives additional income for conducting training, which increases its bottom line just a little bit more at state expense.

The unions are able to organize care providers in a state by convincing a pro-union governor to issue an executive order or a state legislature to pass a law imposing forced unionism on care providers. But usually an
election is held to give the government action a false air of legitimacy. In many cases, a stealth election is held quickly and quietly to certify the union before the providers have time to organize a resistance or to start a media campaign against unionization.

It’s in the union’s interest to conduct a stealth unionization drive. The union needs to win a majority of the votes cast, not a majority from all the workers eligible to vote in the election. So the union may try to get only providers likely to favor unionization to vote in the election. By notifying as few care providers as possible about the election, the union may be able to get enough yes votes from its supporters to be certified, without encountering resistance from dissenting providers.
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Of course, the union is required to notify all eligible voters. But in many cases, care providers seem not to have received notice of the vote and to have been surprised when they learned they had been unionized.

Once the union is certified, providers would have to go through the draconian process of decertification to get rid of the union. Each state has its own procedure for decertification, but all of them are extremely difficult to accomplish. In fact, the procedure is so difficult that no group of care providers has ever achieved decertification.
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Who knows?

If the state can recast independent care providers as “government employees,” give them all the burdens of unionization but none of the privileges of government employment, then what can’t they do? Who are unions going to go after next?

The Government Employee Unions 2.0 model opens up new groups of people to unionization, people who are not actually government workers but who receive funds from the government in relation to their work. Unions will probably expand this model to other groups of workers that receive government funds in connection with their work.

In our age of increasing government intervention in the
economy, almost anyone could potentially be unionized. Union bosses realize this. One union lawyer in a case challenging the unionization of care providers in Michigan admitted in open court that unionizing these care providers was a “slippery slope.”
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He reportedly admitted to the judge that “unionization of any group that accepted state subsidies would be within the state’s authority if it had ‘added value’ to the state or the public’s interest.”
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The union lawyer was simply pointing out that it is a slippery slope when states start handing over independent workers to the unions. Government officials can probably unionize any group of people who are compensated for their work through a government program—as long as the government officials can argue it is in the public interest to unionize them. And what Shadowboss-supported politician wouldn’t agree that unionizing more Americans is in the public interest?

The unions’ next target group may be the over 21 million health-care workers who will be needed to implement Obamacare. New opportunities to unionize health-care workers are probably the key reason the unions supported Obamacare so ardently.
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Once Obamacare is implemented, most health-care workers in America will receive government funds and will be regulated by the government in connection with their work. Health-care workers currently serving Medicare and Medicaid patients also receive government funds. Because only about 14 percent of our nation’s health-care workers are unionized, this represents a huge growth market for the unions.
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What is to stop the unions trying to unionize them all?

Next, unions may be emboldened enough to expand their organizing efforts to groups receiving government funds that have less of a connection to work or employment. This could include people receiving Social Security or Medicare payments, or even veterans—after all, these groups of people worked once to earn their government benefits.

Labor lawyer William Messenger, who represents some groups of care providers in their legal battles to throw off the union mantle, explains, “The representation imposed upon providers is no different than the government designating the American Association of Retired Persons as the mandatory representative of all senior citizens on Medicare;… or the American Banking Association as the mandatory trade association for all financial institutions receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program funds…”
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It is possible that associations like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), a lobbying organization for people over fifty years old, could actually morph into a union representing the aged. After all, the National Education Association (NEA) started as a teachers association and then turned into a labor union later in the 1950s when government employee unionism was on the rise.

If this seems farfetched to you—that in your golden years, the state could appoint the AARP or a union as your representative to argue for increases to your Social Security benefits or Medicare benefits—think again. We should never suffer a failure of imagination about what government employee unions are capable of doing; they are far more innovative than we give them credit for.

Then there are enormous and growing groups of recipients of public assistance, Medicaid, and electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, which we used to call food stamps. Many people receive government aid under programs for parents with dependent children. Surely, these parents work as caregivers to their dependent children, just as parents of disabled people work as caregivers to their children. Similarly, unions might suggest reforming the public assistance programs to require recipients to perform some sort of work in exchange for their benefits. While this may seem like a good idea at first, this change could make it easier to treat welfare recipients as “government employees” and then to unionize them.

And what if we don’t stop unions from forcing all the different groups of people who receive public monies under their control? What
would come next? The next step could be to unionize people who have other relationships with the government—like people whose work is regulated by the state. Once we are used to Government Employee Unions 2.0, couldn’t the Shadowbosses take it one step further and ask the government to treat these people as “government employees” also? Think forced unionization of Realtors, insurance agents, “nail technicians,” and anyone else who requires a license to conduct his livelihood. Of course, that’s virtually everyone. Any type of self-employed workers who are regulated by the state or federal government—which now regulates almost every type of profession or business—could also be forced under union representation.
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Based on how the unions conducted the campaigns over care workers, they would probably start with the least educated, most isolated groups, whom they would unionize “for their own good,” then expand outward from there. We need to stop them now, before this plan goes any further.

For now, we know that government cash is the worm on the hook. We’re the fish. The moment we snap up that juicy worm, we’re caught by the gills and thrown in the union net. Really, who knows what the unions will think of next?

Who is going to stop the unions from rolling out their next wave of organizing the unorganizable?

Our current federal government is chock-full of former union officials and pro-unionists who won’t stop unions from overreaching in their organizing efforts. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius certainly won’t step in—she actually issued an executive order to forcibly unionize seven thousand child-care workers while she was governor of Kansas in 2007.
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What about the First Amendment to our Constitution and our free speech rights? By forcing groups of people who receive all or part of their compensation from the government into unions, the states are foisting an exclusive lobbyist on these people. Once unionized, these people can petition, or speak, with state government only through a single, exclusive voice—their union. Their independent right to political speech, guaranteed by our Constitution, has been taken away.
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