Background from the first article in this series:

Thousands of home-based health care providers have been forced into a union because they receive assistance from the state while they take care of loved ones who are disabled. The Service Employees International Union receives close to $6 million annually in forced dues from this abusive arrangement.

House Bill 4003 would end this injustice by clarifying that Michiganders who care for relatives in their own homes are not government employees, and hence are not appropriate targets for government unions. That bill has passed the House but is stuck in the Senate. While we wait for the Senate to act, the SEIU continues to siphon money that was meant to help families.

Here's one example of where that money might be going, drawn from the SEIU's 2010 LM-2 report.

Change that Works was the recipient of more than $4 million in funding from the Service Employees International Union from January to May of 2010. On its LM-2 report SEIU categorized its funding of CTW as political.  Many SEIU affiliated groups received political cash from the national union, underscoring the political nature of SEIU itself.

CTW's politics were heavily supportive of the Democratic Party and of liberal causes, and its ambitions were grand. It's website advertised that SEIU would "involve millions of Americans in an intensive state-by-state campaign to help President Obama enact Change That Works; change that gets our economy back on track now, and for generations to come."  The group's two main issues appeared to be:

• The "Employee Free Choice Act" — a union-friendly bill that would allow union organizing through a "card-check" process that has proved to be extremely prone to abuse by union operatives, and;
• "Health Insurance Reform" — CTW received most of its contributions at roughly the same time that the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" — occasionally referred to as "Obamacare" — was working its way through Congress.

"Change that Works" was clearly an SEIU project; SEIU's own logo is shown prominently on its webpage. "Change that Works" was one of the largest expenditures that SEIU made, and it was undeniably a political project; SEIU identifies it as such in its own financial reports. "Change that Works" is clear evidence that SEIU is very much driven by a left-of-center ideology.

Monday: The Applied Research Center

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