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Not satisfied with
wrecking the auto sector and most of the state itself, unions and the state
of Michigan conspired to force small business owners into unions the
businesses want no part of and did not even vote for.
Disgusted minds are reading how Michigan Forces
Business Owners Into Public Sector Unions.
Michelle Berry runs a
private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the
birthplace of General Motors. "The Berry Patch," as she calls the
service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a
playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who
need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment
rate.
Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human
Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency
thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on
behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee
union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it's
happening elsewhere in the country.
A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day
care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child
Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United
Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under
the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that
election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.
Many of the state's other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what
was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was "shocked" to find out she
was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the
state created an "employer" for the union to "organize"
against.
Of course, Michigan's independent day-care providers don't work for anybody
except the parents who were their customers. Nevertheless, because some of
these parents qualified for public subsidies, the Child Care Providers
"union" claimed the providers were "public employees."
Michigan's Department of Human Services then teamed with Flint-based Mott Community College to sign an "interlocal agreement" in 2006 establishing a
separate government agency called the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council.
This council was directed to recommend good child-care practices—and
not coincidentally, to serve as a "public employer." Although the
council had almost no staff, no control over the state subsidies and no
supervision of the providers' daily activities, it became the shell
corporation against which the union could organize.
Thus the state created an ersatz employer and an ersatz "bargaining
unit" against which what was essentially an ersatz union could organize.
Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual
dues to the union—from the child-care subsidies. The money should be
going to home-based day-care providers—themselves not on the high end
of the income scale. Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union
that does little for her. She says she is "self employed and wants
nothing to do with the union."
Shielded from market pressures, public employee unions have driven up
taxpayer costs for decades. Now labor leaders are shanghaiing entrepreneurs
such as Ms. Berry and Ms. Loar into government unions because their clients
receive government aid. Who will be next? Grocers? Landlords? Doctors?
Detroit's Model City
Detrioit set out to create a "Model City". Instead it created a
nightmare as the following video shows.
Detroit did not create a
model city, but did succeed in creating an entirely state dependent city.
UAW rules and job banks destroyed the auto sector. Of course management
incompetence helped. Until the bitter end, concessions are seldom if ever
part of union vocabulary, and the unions had the most luxurious health care
coverage on the entire planet. Eventually the scheme went bankrupt as it was
guaranteed to do.
Education Facts
·
Detroit students receive on
average $11,100 per student. The national average is $9600. Yet Detroit students have a graduation rate of 25%.
·
Detroit students have a
greater chance of ending up in prison than graduating high school.
·
Teachers
fight merit pay as they do nearly everywhere else. It is difficult to get rid
of a teacher with tenure no matter what the teacher does.
Snips From The Video
Steven Crowder Asks ....
Why would unions make
concessions if the government continually bails them out?
And why wouldn't the government keep bailing them out when it is the unions
who elect them?
You might be wondering why I've shown you this. Why is it necessary for you
to see a once great city brought to its knees by government bureaucracies and
powerful unions?
And to you I would ask. Look at the current administration's promises to the
American people and compare them to the promises corrupt Detroit politicians
over the last 50 years. They are nearly identical.
Detroit is the perfect laboratory for leftist policies at work for nearly
half a century. When you continue to remove free market principles that have
made this country great and you continue to create a state dependent society
this is very well what America could look like in a very short amount of
time.
Michigan's Cycle of
Decay
·
UAW
runs auto companies into the ground
·
Teachers
run education system into the ground
·
Good
people leave
·
Poverty
rise and so does crime
Instead of discarding what is guaranteed proven not to work, the state of Michigan is hellbent on destroying what little good remains.
Mish
GlobalEconomicAnalysis.blogspot.com
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