Congress Won’t Help, so SEIU and ACORN Make New Friends

We all knew that with the election of Barack Obama Big Labor would have a good friend in the White House. You could tell labor unions thought the election of Obama would help them turn around their steady membership decline.

The stakes were high for big labor, and they put their money where their mouth was. The AFL-CIO pledged to spend $200 million to help elect Obama. A lot of us assumed this was to help pass the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). With Obama in the White House and the Democrats in control of the House and Senate they'd have the clout to push through this bill, stripping the American workforce of a secret ballot vote to determine whether to form a union.

EFCA has stalled, but big labor's agenda has not. Loyal appointees in the Department of Labor (DOL) have been working to reduce union transparency. They're working to roll back regulations that provided information to union members regarding their union finances, regulations that helped prevent and expose embezzlement and corruption. DOL isn't the only department where big labor has insinuated itself. SEIU flack Patrick Gaspard is serving in the White House, Obama has announced the appointment of SEIU Assistant General Counsel to the FEC. Big labor is receiving a big payoff for its support of President Obama.

While the movement within the federal government is disturbing, the real efforts to expand union membership, strength, and power are happening in the states. EFCA has stalled in Congress, but big labor and its big supporter ACORN are working across the country to expand organized labor into previously untouched markets.

A few weeks ago I saw ACORN's Founding Father Wade Rathke speak in Washington, DC. He noted that "The single largest success in the last 20 years of the organized labor movement is home healthcare workers."

For those unfamiliar, SEIU and ACORN have been working in multiple states to lobby state governments to allow unions to organize home healthcare workers. Why is that? Can't they just form a union and be done with it? The simple answer is no, in most states home healthcare workers are actually independent contractors, not employees. As independent contractors they cannot be organized into a union.

But big labor has seen an opportunity to grow its ranks, to collect more dues, to "represent" more people. ACORN and SEIU's solution has been to lobby state governments. They've met with mixed results. These lobbying efforts have been most successful where they have a friendly Governor, like Elliot Spitzer. Spitzer signed an Executive Order provides for union recognition where none is legally warranted.

In states like Missouri, SEIU and ACORN have had to campaign in support of ballot initiatives to lay the ground work for their union expansion.

The real plan to grow the unions is playing out in state legislatures, not Capitol Hill.