FlintTalk.com Forum Index > Political Talk Topic: Michigan Forces Business Owners Into Unions??

Author    Post   Steve Myers Site Admin By PATRICK J. WRIGHT AND MICHAEL D. JAHR Flint, Mich. 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. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703478704574612341241120838.html _________________ Steve Myers Sat Dec 26, 2009 12:30 pm  Gooch F L I N T O I D This part of the story struck me hard: "It's telling that in several states that have gone down this road, state and federal subsidies are the source of the union dues. In Michigan, the scheme is essentially throwing a cash lifeline to unions like the UAW, which are hemorrhaging members. There's another, ironic twist to the story in the Great Lakes state. Last month the Michigan Economic Development Corporation granted a for-profit SEIU subsidiary, the SEIU Member Action Service Center, a $2 million refundable tax credit to locate a new business facility in the state that will provide administrative services for the union and other local labor organizations. The subsidy strikes us as inappropriate because it categorized the SEIU subsidiary as a business and occurred just before the 5,000 member SEIU local 517M granted the state wage concessions. Shamelessly, the SEIU requested the credit because Michigan has high labor costs." They should have used the Tech Center for one. Could have repaid Flint for all the damage they did here. But on top of that isn't this coercion which is what the unions were created to stop? Sat Dec 26, 2009 1:57 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo The origins of this SEIU need to be investigated. Acorn already has its hands in 2 SEIU unions.This smells rotten. Sun Dec 27, 2009 8:02 am    Display posts from previous:   All Posts1 Day7 Days2 Weeks1 Month3 Months6 Months1 Year Oldest FirstNewest First

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