Leaked recording of donor call reveals candid GOP plans for weakening unions
Some big labor news that has gotten surprisingly little attention from most mainstream outlets is that in early May, the Trump administration quietly released a new rule that says home healthcare workers who earn their wages via Medicaid (approximately 800,000 workers today) can no longer directly deduct their union dues from their paychecks.
I covered this news first two weeks ago, because five states, led by California, are now suing the Trump administration over it. “With this rule, the Trump administration is not only harming Medicaid skilled home care workers who have joined unions, but the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who depend on these indispensable workers,” wrote California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
On Friday, I co-published a follow-up story that looks more closely at how exactly this rule-change came to be. It turns out it’s been the brainchild of conservative activists since the GOP was able to successfully accomplish the same thing in Michigan in 2013, but ran into political hurdles whenever they tried to do it after in other states. Facing resistance, conservatives realized getting a rule change through the federal level would be their best bet to ending the practice across the country. They call it “dues skimming” and insist it traps health home care workers into paying fees they don’t want to pay.
This is no small rule change. Since Michigan banned the practice in 2013, SEIU Healthcare Michigan has seen an 84 percent drop in membership, and a 74 percent drop in revenue. Its political spending also took a major dive: going from $3.5 million in lobbying and politics in 2012 to just $290,000 in 2016. Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by less than 11,000 votes.
My co-author and I obtained an audio recording of an invite-only donor call with the State Policy Network, a business-backed network of conservative think tanks around the country. The call was held in mid-June of last year, about two weeks before the pivotal Janus v. Afscme decision, where the Supreme Court said unions can no longer charge non-members fees for collective bargaining services.
The 45-minute call was unusually candid, and we published the whole audio file in the story. Here’s some highlights:
“I want you to know that later this month, or any day now, the chances are good that we may actually have this unprecedented opportunity with the Janus Supreme Court case decision,” said Tracie Sharp, the president and CEO of the State Policy Network. “If it comes down on our side, of course, it makes every state a ‘right-to-work’ state. And so we have the opportunity to change the way the left funds everything that you and I disagree with.”
At a different point on the call, she said, “Once this ruling comes down — and we do expect it to come down in our favor — everything will change. The door to pass a dream list of free-market reforms is going to swing open for us.”
The leaders on the call detailed how they planned to lobby Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services to get them to change the home healthcare rule. In the story we looked at how the Trump administration took the bait.
We also obtained, and published, an 86-slide Powerpoint presentation that consultants prepared for the State Policy Network in October 2017 regarding how exactly to craft their messaging around this issue, and weakening unions more broadly. Rule #1, the consultants advised, is to not criticize unions directly.
You can read the full story at The Intercept.
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