By Olivia Grady

On March 14, 2017, Kevin Mooney, an investigative reporter, published an article in the Daily Signal about a Minnesota decertification project that CWF is helping with. The article title is “Home Caregivers, Alleging Fraud, Push to Decertify Union That Deducts Dues.”

The article starts by giving Mary Barton’s story (her name and her husband’s have been changed because they fear retaliation). Ms. Barton is a personal care assistant (PCA) in Minnesota who takes care of her disabled daughter. The state gives her a Medicaid payment in return.

In 2013, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton (D) signed S.F. 778 into law, making PCAs government workers solely for collective bargaining purposes and allowing unions to unionize these PCAs. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) wasted no time holding an election and claiming victory in 2014.

Ms. Barton does not have to be a part of this union, but she is still represented by them even if she chooses not to be a member.

And Ms. Barton did not want to become part of the union. But when a young woman who was an SEIU representative, Yuliya, came to her home in a southern suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul and asked her to sign a card supporting the union, Ms. Barton did.

Now, $27.90 is being deducted from her check in union dues.

Ms. Barton didn’t realize signing the card allows the SEIU to deduct dues:

“She never said anything about [union] membership, and she just said we would like your support,” Barton told The Daily Signal, describing the visit by the union rep who gave her name as Yuliya.

Her husband, Mike, and she are sharing their story so that other PCAs won’t accidentally sign the union’s card:

But as friendly as she was, Yuliya certainly had a method and technique. She handed me a card to sign and said, ‘We really would like your support.’ She never said anything about membership and she just said we would like your support. Then, I started reading [the card] and saw that it meant dues would be coming out, so I yanked the card away.

Mike added:

They don’t get what they want the first time, so they come back with plan B; they come back with another form to get your signature in some way. That’s what they wanted. They wanted my wife’s signature. The union is like a tapeworm latching onto the PCA Choice program, and as more money comes out you have to ask yourself if the Legislature is going to keep the program going if it just means more money going to the union.

Doug Seaton, the lawyer for the Bartons and other PCAs, is trying to get the union decertified and has brought a lawsuit alleging voter fraud and identity theft.

The PCAs have also started an organization, MNPCA, to collect PCA signatures to trigger another election to vote the SEIU out. MNPCA has found a high percentage of PCAs, however, who didn’t receive a ballot in the 2014 election and a number of bad addresses on the list that the Minnesota government has given to them.

Mooney’s article also mentions a press conference in St. Paul on March 4^th where 4 PCAs spoke to reporters and were joined by CWF’s Executive Director Matt Patterson. State legislators Marion O’Neill (R) and Cindy Pugh (R) also attended the event.

In addition to the decertification effort, Patterson mentioned other fixes to the problem:

“We are pursuing regulatory and legislative fixes at both the federal and state level to foreclose the opportunity for this sort of corruption in the first place,” Patterson, the Center for Worker Freedom official, told The Daily Signal. “This [Medicaid] money was allocated to help those in need, not help labor officials elect their favorite politicians.”

To read the article, please click here.