Now this is going to go over well - forced Unionization

From the Wall Street Journal comes this wonderful little bit of news about Michigan's forced Unionization of Childcare Workers:

Michigan Forces Business Owners Into Public Sector Unions
After hemorrhaging members for decades, labor unions have hit upon a new way to shore up their annual dues revenue.

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 needs 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."

And of course, this idea comes from California and the SEIU is in the thick of it:

The federal question may be raised soon, as other states have pursued similar unionization schemes over the past decade, primarily at the behest of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union, better known as the SEIU. Fourteen states have now enabled home-based day-care providers to be organized into public-employee unions, affecting about 233,000 people. And nine have done so with home health-care providers. The idea to unionize in this way was hatched in California, though ironically Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed legislation to unionize child-care providers.

It's telling that in several states that have gone down this road, state and federal subsidies are the source of the union dues. In Michigan, the scheme is essentially throwing a cash lifeline to unions like the UAW, which are hemorrhaging members.

There's another, ironic twist to the story in the Great Lakes state. Last month the Michigan Economic Development Corporation granted a for-profit SEIU subsidiary, the SEIU Member Action Service Center, a $2 million refundable tax credit to locate a new business facility in the state that will provide administrative services for the union and other local labor organizations. The subsidy strikes us as inappropriate because it categorized the SEIU subsidiary as a business and occurred just before the 5,000 member SEIU local 517M granted the state wage concessions. Shamelessly, the SEIU requested the credit because Michigan has high labor costs.

Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy writ large:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers are scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

The Unions these days are a pale and corrupt shade of their former glory. They only exist to suck on the taxpayers teat and to promote their upper and middle level management. They do absolutely nothing for the rank and file workers under their 'care' Hat tip to Mark Perry for the link.