Big labor has a long history of bankrolling Democratic candidates. But a conservative nonprofit has made a powerful, concrete impact by undercutting this Left-wing scheme, to the tune of $10 million. Many workers are told they have to join a union, when they have the freedom not to do so. A simple public information campaign has saved workers across the country about $10 million, taking that money back from the Left-wing machine.
“Because of Freedom Foundation, ten thousand workers have stopped paying union dues, costing the unions — and Democratic candidates — over $10 million to date,” the conservative nonprofit Freedom Foundation declared in a YouTube video published Tuesday.
This concrete figure came from the Freedom Foundation’s efforts nationwide, the Washington Examiner‘s Emily Jashinsky reported. Democratic governors in states like Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and others invented the fiction that homecare workers were government employees, since their clients (usually chronically ill family members) were using Medicaid money to pay for their care.
This scheme allowed the unions, specifically the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to skim from benefits intended for the sick and the poor, Jashinsky explained.
But the Supreme Court struck it down in the June 2014 ruling Harris v. Quinn. Under that ruling, homecare workers are free to opt out of union membership and pay no dues, because they aren’t true government employees.
In this framework, the Freedom Foundation set out to educate these workers that they have the right to opt out of joining the union, and its efforts have been remarkably successful.
On Friday, the foundation released new data about its work in the Oregon market. A full 11,399 of the 28,667 homecare and personal support workers who had been forced into the SEIU union 503 have decided to leave the union in the last two years — during the same time that the Freedom Foundation had been reaching out to these very workers.
While the Freedom Foundation’s educational efforts have cost unions an estimated $10 million nationwide, that is merely a first step to limiting the Union-Democrat Industrial Complex. According to the foundation, big government unions spent a whopping $250 million supporting liberal politicians in 2016, even while 40 percent of union members support conservatives. (OpenSecrets reported that labor unions spent $207,145,408, with 87.8 percent going to Democrats.)
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the SEIU specifically donated $1,461,756 to congressional candidates in the 2016 cycle, all of which went to Democrats. An AFL-CIO exit poll found that 37 percent of union members (and 43 percent of union households) voted for Donald Trump, while slightly more than half (56 percent of union members, 51 percent of union households) voted for Hillary Clinton.
“By educating union members about their right to stop paying union dues, Freedom Foundation defunds Big Labor,” the foundation’s video declared. “That means more money for the workers and less money for liberal politicians.”
The foundation deserves praise for freeing over 11,000 workers from unions in Oregon alone. If workers want to join a union, that is their right, and if they want to support liberals, they should do so. But it is wrong for government to force workers to join unions, and then for unions to bankroll politicians who do not represent all of their members.
Watch the video below.
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