What have unions done for working people? Reduced working hours, improved working conditions. Think of the Triangle Waist Fire. Think of Chinese factories where workers live in dormitories 24/7 and work long hours seven days a week in dangerous conditions.
Here is the CTU statement on the Harris v. Quinn ruling:
” CTU Stands in Solidarity With Home Care Workers in
Wake of Harris v. Quinn Ruling
CHICAGO –Today, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis released the following statement upon the announcing of a decision in the Harris v. Quinn ruling:
“This unfortunate court decision will not deter Illinois health workers from fighting for democracy and employment security nor consumers who deserve to have quality healthcare services. It is ironic that this ruling comes as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in which hard won gains are slowly being rolled back,” Lewis said.
“It is therefore fitting that I echo the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said: ‘In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as “right-to-work,” it provides no “rights” and no “works.” Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining…. We demand this fraud be stopped….’
“Harris v. Quinn proves that organized labor must be vigilant and deliberate in our fight against the right-to-work efforts trying to muddy our state and disrupt the quality of life for thousands of citizens. The CTU joins our brothers and sisters impacted by this ruling and stand in solidarity in this fight for economic and social justice.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m proud to see Karen Lewis speaking for the right of health workers to organize.
The Obama administration has also spoken out on the right side of this one, for once.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/30/statement-press-secretary-harris-v-quinn
Does this decision actually override Massachusetts law?
The DOJ filed an amicus brief supporting the Illinois law.
There is a culture of ingratitude that trickles down from the delusion of the “self-made man” at the top of the economic pyramid to the anti-labor laborer at the bottom. That delusion is the only that does trickle down.
All of this self-serving rhetoric, yet the union’s position here is purely financial self-interest. The union is trying to get a share of the Medicaid money that is reimbursing a non-union mother for caring for her disabled son at home.
It’s because of the union that mothers of disabled kids have the ability to get state money for caring for their own children.
No, it isn’t — Medicaid exists on its own, not because of the union.
Sigh. Yes, dear, Medicaid exists on its own. But it’s because of the union that mothers are able to access it to get paid for caring for their own children. Try doing some research before making yourself look like an idiot.
If you have evidence that Illinois would NOT pay these home aides through its Medicaid program but for the union taking a slice off the top, please provide a link.
WT, look in the mirror for self serving rhetoric.
Maybe unions could find better things to do than to rip off mothers of disabled kids? freebeacon.com/issues/a-reluctant-union-member-fights-back/
Learn something about the health care system. The point of home health aides that are paid by Medicaid was two-fold: it was to give disabled people the opportunity to remain in their homes and to save Medicaid money on nursing home costs. That was the point of it. It’s a government program. The state wants to save money, and they DO save money, because home health aides are 90% women and most of them are either minorities or recent immigrants or both.
All they argued was that they are doing the exact same job that people in a nursing home do. They are. It’s real work. They’re not doing it for charity. They wanted to organize because they have little or no workplace protections. Now, that doesn’t matter for your ONE situation, where the mother is working in her own home, but it matters a lot to all the millions of women who are working in OTHER peoples’ homes.
Once again, the “choice” proponents are ignoring the fact that they are IN a public system. Whether you like it or not, you’re not in the “private sector” and you can’t PRETEND you’re in the private sector when you’re relying on public money.
All this decision does it make home health care workers a lesser category than nursing home workers, and that is both unfair and ridiculous.
Under the twisted logic of this decision, nursing home workers are the “employees” of the disabled people they care for.
Does that make any sense to you? Then why should home health care workers be the “employees” of the disabled people THEY care for?
Is his mother his employee? Because that’s what’s she’s arguing.
All “they” argued. You’re deeply confused. This case wasn’t about whether the union could exist for the people who want it. It was about whether mothers taking care of their own disabled children have to fork over part of their Medicaid reimbursement to the union EVEN IF they are not members of this union and never wanted to be.
So tell me again, why does this union, which is simply rearranging Medicaid benefits that already exist anyway by statute, have the right to rip off mothers this way?
WT — where are you seeing that the plaintiffs in this case were mothers taking care of their own disabled children? I don’t see that in the court’s opinion.
Articles about the plaintiffs who sued, such as these:
freebeacon.com/issues/a-reluctant-union-member-fights-back/
freebeacon.com/issues/meet-the-plaintiff/
If this were only about mothers getting government funds for taking care of their own children not having to pay union agency fees, than the Supreme Court could have ruled narrowly saying that only people in this special situation could be exempt. Instead, they used this special situation to rule that unions can’t charge agency fees for representing workers who don’t want to join a union. That effects every union in the country – aimed at defunding, and eventually crushing them.
Right, WT, because why can’t they CHOOSE to OPT out of a system they benefit from and was not designed for mothers but was designed for people who work at that job and don’t want to be treated like contract temps?
They took a program that was designed to save Medicaid money and does save Medicaid money and turned it into some noble crusade for their individual rights.
No matter that millions of women do this for a living right? It’s all about the “moms” and their rights.
They’re in a publicly-paid system. They’re not freelancers just picking and choosing what rules apply to them.
What about all the home health care workers who are caring for other people? The VAST majority of them? They’ve now been told their work isn’t real work and what they do has no value.
I remember the days when mothers were NOT paid to take care of their own children. How do you like them apples?
Free beacon appears to be engaging in yellow biased and slanted journalism. Gee, just like WT.
It may be biased and it may have a slant, but it is interesting, the details about the lead plaintiff.
If only I lived in Chicago proper…I’d vote for Karen Lewis for mayor!!!
Free Beacon is a far right wing rag.
WT
June 30, 2014 at 6:28 pm
Articles about the plaintiffs who sued, such as these:
freebeacon.com/issues/a-reluctant-union-member-fights-back/
Because who cares about all those other workers, right? It’s not like they’re all part of a government-funded system that has goals that are not completely aligned with their specific personal preference, right?
Everything is a marketplace and people can just fill their baskets with what they like and reject the rest, because after all, THEY don’t need a labor union!
“The workers in Harris aren’t typical government bureaucrats; they are homecare assistants with Illiinois’s Medicaid-funded in-homecare program, serving thousands of people with disabilities. After being authorized to vote to unionize with SEIU years ago, this workforce became a relatively recent addition to Illinois’s public sector. In many other states, home health attendants not only lack union coverage; their jobs are precarious, low-paid and disproportionately done by women and people of color.”
Hopefully, we can reach our goal and make ALL home health care workers “precarious and low-paid”
Some of them were getting mighty cheeky with all those wage and hour protections. Thank God the justices put them back in their place! It’s not “real work” anyway.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/180455/supreme-court-ruling-harris-v-quinn-will-undermine-gains-made-low-wage-home-healthcare-w
“Under the Illinois union contract (the subject of the original court case) home care aides saw their wages increase from $7 an hour to $11.25 an hour. The wage is expected to increase to $13 an hour by December. Without a fair share fee to ensure that all who benefit share the cost, worker victories like that may not be feasible.
The plaintiff is an Illinois home care worker named Pamela Harris who opposed her colleagues voting to join SEIU. But, the case got all the way to the Supreme Court thanks to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), a Virginia-based non-profit that claims to fight “compulsory unionism.” NRTWLDF is the nonprofit arm of the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC).
The list of donors to both groups reads like a “who’s who” of powerful conservatives: the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the Walton Family [of Walmart] Foundation, , and the John M. Olin Foundation.”
There’s the incredibly generous Walton Family Foundation again, just making sure the children of home health care workers stay poor.
To all naive workers:
Please learn to observe and think carefully the purpose that rich employers try to manipulate legal system.
Please ask yourselves why rich, smart, and powerful employers still need LAWS to support and protect them? Then, please ask yourselves again and again WHY poor laborers/workers are naive enough to refuse THE RIGHT to have UNION who can collectively fight and demand on behalf of workers’ benefit regarding minimum wages, overtime hours, healthcare and dental care, vacation time, sick leave, pension,…
It took so many years to gain the freedom of expression, to win apartheid, to ban racism in workforce, to pay equally regardless of gender. Today, people from top to bottom are ignorant, greedy, and selfish so that they will cause chaos and self-destruction through abandonment of humanity, kindness, and being considerate.
Rich people will face fascism due to control and power, poor people will face communism due to greed and ignorant. Middle class will become either rich or poor and become leader in fascism or communism. That is how I learn from history from 19th century up to today.
Please watch documentary film from Hitler regarding Holocaust, from Mao regarding poor and rich farmers who are being robbed by red army. Most of all, please take a good look at those countries like Cuba, Viet Nam and South Africa and see for yourselves the life of those citizens before and after independence.
Please read all stories from Charles Dickens in order to understand the lives of workers without union’s protection in the 19th century – Industrial Age. Namaste. Back2basic
Let me add something one of my uncles told me. He was 96 when he died about ten years ago.
As a young man, he remembered going to the railroad yard hoping to get work to earn enough to buy food. There was no union then. He said hundreds got up early every morning to show up. The manager in charge of loading and unloading the trains would stand in the opening of one of the box cars and throw ten, fifteen or twenty chips over the heads of the crowd of hopeful workers. Those who caught the chips and kept them got to work sixteen hours that day for about 25 cents.
The next day was a repeat.
This was in the United States during the Great Depression.
Without labor unions working as a collective voice for the workforce, most of the rich and famous will make sure the world we live in returns to that time. Study history as Back2basic suggests and you will learn from it. Mankind doesn’t change and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. History repeats itself if we allow it.
I read an article recently that compared business methods and this article said that about 4 out of every 5 business are run like dictatorships and the workers are not treated with respect or paid a fair wage with benefits.
Businesses like Costco that are not unionized, Wholefoods, and Trader Joe’s that treat their workers with respect and pays them a living wage with benefits are the exception. Costco has even been criticized by Wall Street because of how much they pay their employees (like $12 or $14 an hour instead of the minimum wage). The stock holders grumble that if Costco paid their employees less, the stock holders would make more from the stocks. If you doubt this, Google it. Costco’s CEO basically told Wall Street to “F” off without using the “F” word. Companies like Costco have a high retention rate compared to corporations like Wall-Mart.
Why is it that some of the 1% who have the most money have spent HUGE fortunes on propaganda and lobbyists in state capitals and Washington DC for decades to destroy the labor unions? What do they have to gain?
Negative opinions of labor unions come from that propaganda and if you believe them and you are not a billionaire or millionaire, what does that say about you?
The answer may be found in this Abraham Lincoln quote: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Who is greedy—the Koch brothers who are worth more than one hundred billion dollars (combined) and are willing to pollute the air, water and soil to increase their wealth or the union worker who is paid maybe $25 an hour with a retirement and health plan that cuts into the profits and wealth of people like Bill Gates, the Walton family or Eli Broad?
Without labor unions, the worker has no voice. The only voice heard will be from someone like Bill Gates.
While I am all for home healthcare workers being able to unionize, I am not sure why parents who take care of their own children should be required to join. If the amount the family receives from the state is affected by union negotiations, then I can see the point. I just don’t know how it works. Anybody more familiar with the inner workings?
I agree with you on this narrow point and I would be fine if the Supreme Court had made clear that their ruling only affects parents taking care of their own kids. But parents taking care of their own kids are a small subsection of all home healthcare aides, the majority of whom are very much benefiting from – and should pay for – union representation.
I would reverse myself on this position if those parents are benefiting from the union’s negotiations. They may not consider their benefit as wages, but if they are receiving more because the union has negotiated a higher rate, then they should be paying into the system.
We can thank Ronald Reagan for standing-up to those pesky air traffic controllers. We should have rioted in the streets back then, but we were too naïve to see what would inevitably follow.