2024 Senate Bill 790 / Public Act 144

Mackinac Center Analysis

SB 790-91 would restore a practice known as a dues skim for Michigan’s home healthcare workers. This scheme drains the pocketbooks of workers who devote their lives to caring for chronically sick and disabled citizens, often their own loved ones, to benefit unions. It should be rejected. Home healthcare workers are typically compensated via federal funding, and their employer is the patient they care for. Despite this, SB 790-91 would create a new state entity to act as the “employer” of home healthcare workers to allow them to be unionized. Workers, in turn, are forced to pay hundreds of dollars a year for little in return. In the early 2000s, the SEIU successfully lobbied the Granholm administration to create the Michigan Quality Care Council to act as the employer of home healthcare workers. SEIU Healthcare Michigan was selected as these employees’ exclusive representative, despite fewer than 20% of employees voting in favor of unionization. The result was that the SEIU extracted $6 million in dues payments a year from these workers, despite the union having no employer to bargain against. In theory, a union is supposed to bargain on behalf of employees to secure better terms and conditions of employment. But in this case, there is no real ability for a union to do so. The result is that unions get to collect a portion of the home healthcare worker’s federal stipend. But providers will continue to give the same level of care to their loved ones with less money available to do so. The dues skim is unpopular with workers, and with the Michigan public. When it ended in 2013, SEIU Healthcare’s membership plummeted to 20% of its previous peak. The program is equally unpopular with Michigan voters, who rejected an attempt to enshrine dues skim via Proposition 4 of 2012 by 14 percentage points.