Free Republic

The Service Employees International Union will have to pay the second-highest fine in Michigan history for its failed 2012 campaign to preserve forced union dues among home care workers. Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said that the politically powerful union agreed to pay the state nearly $200,000 for failing to properly disclose donors and file timely campaign reports. The union funneled more than $9 million into two 501(c)(4) non-profit groups, Home Care First Inc. and Citizens for Affordable Quality Home Care, which served as the public face of a ballot initiative. “These organizations cannot be used as a means...

Less than six months after the Michigan Education Association boasted of how it retained 99 percent of its membership after the state's right-to-work law went into effect, a union executive testified under oath that about 8,000 members have not filled out paperwork to have dues automatically taken from their paycheck. Eight thousand people not paying dues is a far greater number than the 1,500 the union claimed were not paying because they exercised their rights and opted out of the union. In testimony before the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, MEA Executive Director Gretchen Dziadosz said some teachers had not been...

Two Michigan teachers who filed unfair labor practice complaints against the Michigan Education Association have won their freedom from the union. The MEA is no longer contesting complaints from Coopersville kindergarten teacher Miriam Chanski and hall of fame wrestling coach William "Ray" Arthur, said Patrick Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, which represents the teachers. Last year, Chanski and Arthur, as well as a group of other teachers from across the state, asked the Mackinac Center to help them get out of their union. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation filed complaints on their behalf with the Michigan Employment...

The president of the teachers union in the Woodhaven-Brownstown School District can't be laid off, according to the union contract, but a 2011 state law prohibits that kind of protection. The "Super Seniority" clause in the contract states: "The Association president and the Union chief negotiator shall not be subject to layoff." Inserting, or keeping that kind of clause in the union contract, is part of a larger problem happening across the state where school districts and unions have negotiated provisions that are prohibited from bargaining. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy surveyed 130 school district collective bargaining agreements that...

Under pressure because of the state's right-to-work law, the Michigan Education Association is working to better inform its members of some of the things they get for the money they pay in dues. MEA members pay about $635 a year for the state portion of their dues and an additional amount for local and national dues, which amounts to an average of about $900 to $1,000 a year for most members. The MEA recently highlighted one benefit, the $1 million in liability insurance it provides its teachers. The union pays $4.35 a year per member to offer that benefit. The...

At first blush, one could assume the Michigan Education Association would be against humiliating and intimidating school employees, especially the ones it represented for years. The MEA says all the right things. In the Sept. 2013 edition of its magazine, "Voice," it warned about a survey that showed how cyberbullies were targeting school employees with the "obvious psychological harm" it causes. And earlier this year, MEA Spokesman Doug Pratt told a Senate committee that the MEA doesn't divulge information on the standing of union members "due to privacy considerations." Yet, the MEA has remained silent as one of its own...

Susan Bank has spent 39 years working in education and paid thousands of dollars to the Michigan Education Association over the years. But when the middle school special education teacher expressed an interest in getting out of the union and was told a collection agency would come after her if she didn’t pay her dues, she said she’d had enough. The Novi teacher now is suing to get out of the union. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation today filed a lawsuit in Oakland County Circuit Court on her behalf. Bank is suing the MEA because the union has a "duty...

LANSING — The Michigan Education Association sent out multiple emails informing its members on how to pay dues, but the union didn't see fit to use its resources to inform members of their right to leave the union. According to MEA officials, its members can only leave the union if they say they are doing so in writing during the month of August. "Does MEA have the capacity of telling people about deadlines before deadlines pass?" Mackinac Center Legal Foundation Director Patrick Wright asked Michigan Education Association Executive Director Gretchen Dziadosz at a hearing Wednesday before Administrative Law Judge Julia...

Bill Clinton accepted a $225,000 speaking fee from the nonprofit Washington Hospital Center smack in the middle of two big rounds of layoffs in 2012 — one of a number of tax-exempt organizations that have paid big money to hear the former president talk. The $225,000 payment wasn’t made public by the hospital on its annual Internal Revenue Service forms, but rather appeared among dozens of lucrative speeches by Mr. Clinton reported on his wife’s final ethics filing as secretary of state. “No disrespect to Bill Clinton, but that money could’ve gone a long way and been put to better...

The recent defeat of a unionization effort by the UAW at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee was not only a major setback for the union, but also for those pushing "card check" legislation. Card check legislation, officially known as the "Employee Free Choice Act," was introduced in Congress in 2009 and would "authorize the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union . . . when a majority of employees voluntarily sign authorizations designating that union to represent them." In other words, employees would "vote" by signing a card in the presence of a union representative, rather than voting in...

AFSCME union officials posted the names of employees who opted out of the union at a Michigan hospital. EAG News reported: A top labor official told MLive recently that the public posting of names of union members who opted out of the union serves as a membership renewal reminder to other union members. Lawrence Roehrig, international vice president of AFSCME and secretary treasurer of Michigan AFSCME Council 25, made his comments in an MLive story that appeared after Michigan Capitol Confidential broke the news that AFSCME Hurley Medical Center Employees Local 1603 posted the names of workers who exercised their...

Kollin VanDenHeuvel is a college student in a 90-day temporary position that offers no benefits at Flint's Hurley Medical Center. So he said he saw little advantage to joining the union. In response, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1603 union posted his name on a list at the hospital to serve "notice" that he exercised his rights under state law and opted out of the union. VanDenHeuvel and three other workers names were posted on a bulletin board in a public area near the hospital cafeteria. Michigan's right-to-work law no longer requires workers to pay...

Paramedics and emergency medical technicians made it clear that they do not want to form a union at Huron Valley Ambulance. According to information obtained from the National Labor Relations Board in a Freedom of Information Act request, votes tallied by the NLRB showed that 221 EMS workers voted against forming a union while just 138 voted in favor of the petition to unionize. There were about 430 eligible voters, but only 359 votes counted and 10 others were listed as “changed ballots” and not counted in the total vote. In January, workers from HVA Workers – with the help...

These kids should learn write from wrong. Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects. Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its “blended learning” program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap. Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

DETROIT — The United Auto Workers' membership and dues are down sharply from just six years ago. In another sign of weakness, the union suffered a stunning defeat this month when it tried to organize a Tennessee factory run by labor-friendly Volkswagen. The rejection, by a close vote, was a major setback in the union's effort to expand in the South, where non-union, foreign companies such as VW, Nissan and Hyundai are rapidly growing. But instead of relief, Detroit's three automakers — Ford, Chrysler and General Motors — are increasingly anxious about the 78-year old union's future. For them, it's...

**SNIP** As a teacher who worked there for many years, I can tell you that it wasn’t because the city wasn’t warned. The children of PS 106 were failed by administrators, government lawmakers and union officials — a host of top people who couldn’t be bothered to care. **SNIP** To show just how clueless and uncaring the administration was — in December 2013, PS 106 received a glowing report. At the time, there was no mandated gym, no special-education teacher (I had left and wasn’t replaced), no books, no art and no extended-day services! PS 106 received millions in extra...

Shirley Temple was an actor, a diplomat, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and wife for fifty-five years to the late Charles Alden Black.

The United Auto Workers said on Friday it filed an appeal with the government over "interference by politicians and outside special interest groups" in an election last week in Tennessee where Volkswagen workers rejected the union. The union said in a statement that its appeal to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board details "a coordinated and widely publicized coercive campaign conducted by politicians and outside organizations to deprive Volkswagen workers of their federally protected right to join a union."

The federal government on Tuesday indicted multiple union members for burning down a Quaker church in 2012. Ten members of a Philadelphia ironworkers union face charges of arson and racketeering in connection with a fire against the church, which was employing non-union workers. . . . . . The group of self-described THUGS—an acronym for “Those Helpful Union Guys”—allegedly burned down the meetinghouse as part of a wider campaign of violence against non-union work sites across the city.

7 elementary school staff hire lawyers Fallsburg police investigating the reported discovery of heroin and drug paraphernalia in a faculty bathroom at Benjamin Cosor Elementary School say the refusal by a group of teachers to cooperate is hampering their probe. No one has been charged, but six teachers and an aide were identified as having used the men's room before a school staff member reportedly found a heroin baggie on Feb. 11. Just before the winter break in December, heroin and needles were reportedly found in the same bathroom. Each of the seven faculty members initially agreed to give urine...