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Despite Gov. Jennifer Granholm's year-long, glaring public silence on the stealth unionization of Michigan's home-based day care providers, all roads seem to lead to her office.
For more than a year, Mackinac Center Communications Specialist Kathy Hoekstra has been investigating the mechanism by which Michigan's private, home-based day care providers were forced into a public employees union. Along the way, Hoekstra uncovered several nuggets that hinted the scheme was hatched at the top of the administration, in collusion with the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. When she discovered a little-viewed video online, Hoekstra's suspicions were confirmed.
The video was from 2008 and showed Gov. Granholm speaking at AFSCME's 38th international convention. In light of her office's later insistence that they merely complied with the unionization request procedure, the governor's boast in the opening lines of the video was quite startling:
"In Michigan because of the partnership between AFSCME and the governor's office, this means that 45,000 new AFSCME members, quality child care providers, will be on the ground providing care to children."
Hoekstra incorporated this portion of Gov. Granholm's speech into a video that laid out the rest of the evidence that points to the governor's administration as being complicit with the UAW And AFSCME in conjuring up a way to turn private business owners and independent contractors into public employees for the sake of boosting union ranks.
The video made a big splash in the blogosphere as well as Detroit radio waves. WJR 760AM's Frank Beckmann interviewed Mackinac Center Legal Foundation Director Patrick Wright, who said, "This footage forever ties this scheme to the executive branch."
