Michigan: Union organizes business owners in stealth drive

The big news story from Michigan on Christmas Day was the attempted terrorist bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight.

That same day, with almost no one noticing, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed that deserves your attention. After decades of ignoring the obvious--manufacturing jobs will continue to vanish--unions, even the UAW, are looking at business segments to organizers. Such as day care. And it doesn't stop there. Labor is organizing business owners. That's right, business owners. Including one in Flint, Michigan.

Michelle Berry runs a private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the birthplace of General Motors. "The Berry Patch," as she calls the service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment rate.

Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it's happening elsewhere in the country.

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.

Many of the state's other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was "shocked" to find out she was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the state created an "employer" for the union to "organize" against.

AFSCME and SEIU attempted the same chicanery in Illinois with home health care providers. But their targets ascertained what was occurring and stopped it.

Michigan has the nation's highest unemployment rate. And yes, unions are part of the problem there.

Related posts:

More unions becoming "government unions"

Unwanted unionization update: Activist calls for Gov. Quinn to rescind executive order

Technorati tags: SEIU labor politics AFSCME uaw Michigan child care