Home child-care worker Julia Perez opened her door in Grandview, Wash., earlier this year to a foot soldier in the latest front in the age-old fight over the future of public-sector unions. A woman, sent by a conservative group called the Freedom
Foundation, told Ms. Perez she could save money by leaving her union, the
Service Employees International Union, which represents home child-care workers
in the state. A few days later, Ms. Perez mailed in a simple form to cancel her
union membership, saving about $10 per paycheck.
For the past year, the Freedom Foundation has been at the
vanguard of an emerging effort to undercut public-sector unions by depriving
them of dues-paying members one at a time. While some national conservative
groups engage in broad lobbying fights in Washington, D.C., seeking to make it
harder for labor unions to recruit new members or collect dues, the
foundation’s strategy involves engaging unions led by the mammoth SEIU in
door-to-door combat for union members like Ms. Perez.
The pay gap between public school teachers and similar
professionals expanded to 17% last year, compared with a 4% gap in 1996. WSJ's
Melanie Trottman has details on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero.
A few other antiunion groups across the country have
begun efforts to persuade union members to leave or stop paying a portion of
their dues. In Las Vegas, a group called the Nevada Policy Research Institute
instructs union members on how to opt out of their union during a two-week
period each July. The Association of American Educators, a nonunion teachers
group, is seeking to expand that effort to dozens of other states.
The Freedom Foundation’s campaign appears to be the
biggest effort of its kind. In Washington and Oregon, its home territory, as
many as 100 activists work to tell thousands of individuals in the home
health-care and child-care businesses, who are considered public-sector workers
because they are paid with Medicaid funds, that they can save as much as $600 a
year by voluntarily leaving their labor unions. The group is also pressing
teachers in smaller school districts to disband their unions.
In December, activists dressed as Santa Claus stood
outside state office buildings in Olympia in Washington and Portland and Salem
in Oregon with signs that read: “Give Yourself a Christmas Bonus.” They handed
out information telling state workers how to opt out of paying the portion of
their union dues used for political spending, which can account for $250 to
$300 a year.
“Most of the conservative groups in Washington have never
been engaged in hand to hand combat—and we are,” says Tom McCabe, the head of
the Freedom Foundation.
Mr. McCabe took over running the group two years ago
after a 20-year career as the head of a homebuilders association in Washington
state, where he regularly battled with labor unions.
“Everything we tried to do was blocked by the unions,” he
said, referring to legislation on taxes and regulations and measures the
association advocated.
The foundation spent $3.4 million last year, up from $2.2
million in 2014. It is funded by about 5,000 individuals and conservative
groups, and it isn’t required to disclose who its donors are.
The door-to-door effort was launched as the result of a
2014 Supreme Court decision permitting union workers in home health- or
child-care to opt out of their labor union.
So far, Mr. McCabe’s team has knocked on the doors of
about 15,000 home health-care and child-care workers out of about 50,000
overall in Washington state since July 2014. He is targeting about 35,000
workers in Oregon.
Mr. McCabe gets the names of individual union members by
sending open-records requests to state governments. Precise union membership
figures are difficult to tally, but Mr. McCabe says the number of unionized
child-care workers has fallen by nearly 60% since he started the effort.
The group plans to launch similar efforts in California
shortly and is weighing campaigns in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
David Rolf, the president of the SEIU in Washington
state, said that Mr. McCabe “talks a big game, but they just aren’t having the
impact they claim to be having.”
The SEIU has fought the Freedom Foundation by filing a
lawsuit seeking to block the government from handing over the names of home
health workers to Mr. McCabe’s outfit. Last month, a court ruled in Mr.
McCabe’s favor, permitting him to reach out to home health-care workers.
Labor unions are also collecting signatures for a ballot
initiative that would keep confidential the names of home health-care workers.
And they have filed legal complaints arguing that the Freedom Foundation is
violating its tax-exempt status.
The unions have also mounted a direct attack on Mr.
McCabe, his group and his donors.
The SEIU and other unions launched a group called the
Northwest Accountability Project, which has sent leaflets to Mr. McCabe’s
neighbors in Olympia calling him a “far right-wing extremist” who is funded by
“out of state billionaires who want to keep wages low, eliminate paid sick
leave and slash crucial funding for quality education.”
The union group sent a similar message to his neighbors
via phone calls to their homes.
“The bottom line is we are taking their money,” Mr.
McCabe said. “That’s very threatening to them.”
Source: The
Wall Street Journal
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