When workers are given a choice to either pay unions dues or keep the money for themselves, they’re choosing to keep the money. In 2012 Michigan became a right-to-work state. Since then, 80% of home-based caregivers have left SEIU according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:
More than 44,000 home-based caregivers no longer are part of the SEIU Healthcare Michigan, according to federal reports filed by the union.
The workers previously were forced to pay dues or fees to the SEIU after the union orchestrated a scheme that took money from the Medicaid checks of the people the workers were caring for in homes across the state. The “dues skim” ended in 2013, but not before the SEIU took more than $34 million from the elderly and disabled across the state.
According to the union’s LM-2 report filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, 44,347 home-based caregivers have opted to stay out of the union.
That number represents virtually all of the long-term home-based caregivers affected by the dues skim. It also is more than 80 percent of the 55,265 members the union claimed to have at the end on 2012. Most of those who have remained in the union are workers employed at private medical facilities and joined the union in traditional organizing drives. The SEIU health care workers were organized in a mail-in effort that most did not participate in nor did they know a vote was even taking place.
