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LIVINGLIBERTY A PUBLICATION OF THE FREEDOM FOUNDATION | OCTOBER 2018
ABANDON SHIP SEIU 775 continues losing streak with embarassing court losses and the exit of longtime leader
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Freedom Foundation PO Box 552 Olympia, WA 98507
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EIU 775’s most recent legal humiliation, being forced to finally concede that workers who never joined the union in the first place cannot be forced to pay dues, is an embarrassment for more than just the union itself. It also lays bare a Washington State Supreme Court more concerned with partisanship than principle and may well have been the deciding factor in SEIU 775’s decision to part ways with founding president David Rolf just days after the union capitulated. But first and foremost, it represents freedom for approximately 6,000 Washingtonians who spent decades watching helplessly as the union skimmed money from their paychecks that had been earmarked by Medicaid for the care of their low-income, disabled family members and loved ones. Since its dubious founding in 2002, SEIU 775 has believed every Medicaid-paid home healthcare provider owed it a percentage of his or her salary — either as regular dues or so-called “agency fees” deducted from workers who had successfully opted out of the union but were still expected to fund its collective bargaining costs. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled in Harris v. Quinn (2014) that home health caregivers — in addition to home childcare providers, language-access providers and adult family home providers — were not fullfledged public employees and could not be compelled to pay the union anything.
By JEFF RHODES, Managing Editor
The ruling further made clear that unions needed a worker’s informed consent prior to deducting dues. Consequently, the unions representing all the other Washington state workers affected by Harris grudgingly agreed to wait until given permission to start garnishing their members’ paychecks. But SEIU 775, the Washington’s largest and most ruthless public employee union, refused to comply. As it had for years, the union continued deducting dues from every Medicaid homecare provider unless or until they were able to navigate the maze of rules and regulations imposed by SEIU 775 to make the opting-out process as difficult as possible. In a March 2015 court declaration, in fact, SEIU 775 Secretary-Treasurer Adam Glickman admitted the union was then seizing dues from the paychecks of about 6,000 caregivers who had never signed up for union membership. Later that same year, the Freedom Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Washington caregivers led by Miranda Thorpe demanding the state stop collecting dues unless authorized by the worker. Weak as the union’s case was, it still went all the way to the Washington State Supreme Court, and in May 2017 the justices ruled 9-0 that the unauthorized seizures were permitted by state law. The justices did not rule on whether the practice or the state law was actually constitutional. It didn’t take long for that question to be answered, though. In January 2018, SEE ABANDON PAGE 5