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This is a testimony submitted to the House Appropriations Committee by Patrick J. Wright on September 25, 2024.
These bills would unnecessarily take money from people who are caring for their sick and disabled family members and give it to a union.
This isn’t collective bargaining. The care recipient hires and fires the care provider, the state and federal government provides the money, MDHHS handles the tax withholdings. There is nothing here that a fake employer can do except to masquerade as a collective bargaining foil. This is lobbying, pure and simple. This isn’t the UAW and Ford. The Home Help Caregiver Council is a useless sham. Since mandatory unionization ended, the program has doubled in funding, from around $300 million to around $600 million over the last decade. You, the legislature, decide the funding levels and the pay rate. What is the benefit of giving the union a 2.75% cut of $600 million? For the union, it’s an up to $16.3 million a year bounty. Caregivers will have to take time away from their loved ones to attend a mandatory training on important, but yet simple tasks, such as bathing, feeding, and toileting. Everyday tasks that they already know how to do. They’ll also be forced to sit through a half hour unionization drive, a special privilege given to no other lobbying group. The SEIU will be able to use this time to pressure individuals into joining the union. And once in the union, similar schemes in other states show that the SEIU will do everything it can to keep people from getting out. Aside of being bad policy, it’s unconstitutional. This body cannot make private citizens public employees, just as anyone who receives Medicare or Medicaid, or the doctors who provide them care, are not public employees. Even accepting the fiction that they are public employees, they’d be under the Michigan Civil Service Commission, not MERC. These two bills would take necessary resources from our most vulnerable citizens and their family member providers and divert a windfall to the SEIU, for the union to use as it sees fit, including spending on partisan politics. This is atrocious public policy and you should reject it.Patrick J. Wright is the vice president for legal affairs at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy
