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.

SEIU Healthcare Michigan, like many programs of the Service Employees International Union, is tied in with a bewildering array of SEIU entities, all of whom partake in the union's extremist politics. The national SEIU organization transferred close to $5.2 million to SEIU-HM in 2010. Out of this, $839,000 was described as "organizing," an area where SEIU has been known to ally itself with political organizations. More than $4 million of the SEIU transfer to SEIU-HM was described as "rebates to memberships;" what these rebates were for or why they were necessary is unexplained.

SEIU also transferred $186,000 to SEIU-HM as political spending. What this expressly political money was used for is also unexplained, but SEIU Healthcare Michigan shares a Detroit office with SEIU Local 79, the same local that supposedly organized the relatives of disabled Michiganders who received state assistance — the bargaining unit that is at the heart of the entire SEIU dues skimming controversy. SEIU-HM's website includes a page defending the organization of persons who are not state employees. SEIU-HM President Marge Faville also serves as the Secretary-Treasurer of Local 79. These sort of situations, where officers carry multiple titles, is common in SEIU's amoeba-like structure. Money diverted from families is almost certainly being used to defend the whole dues skimming arrangement — a predictable but regrettable consequence of a state law that allows forced dues while being lax about how those dues are used and accounted for.

SEIU Healthcare Michigan is one of several SEIU Healthcare affiliates. There is also a national SEIU Healthcare organization, which was the recipient of $145,247 from the national union. SEIU Healthcare is determined to defend the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (aka Obamacare) and the Obama administration's controversial decision to permit only an extremely narrow religious exemption from its contraception coverage mandate.

This is one of many SEIU projects that Michigan taxpayers are indirectly supporting with money that was supposed to go to families of disabled people.

Monday: Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Previously:

Clean Economy Development Center

Change That Works

Applied Research Center

Brave New Foundation

The Atlas Project

Change.org

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