The Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Harris v. Quinn has been a body blow to the labor organization at the heart of that case, SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana.
New Labor Department filings show that it has lost 8,000 dues-paying members and $4 million in revenue since the justices’ decision, which held that that state-subsidized homecare providers could no longer be forced to support the union. Without that power, it is losing its grip over its members.
The federal filings show that the union went from 64,000 dues-paying members in 2014 to 56,000 at the end of last year. Over the same period, membership dues declined from $37 million to $32 million. Overall, the union’s revenue fell from $44 million to $40 million.
The situation may get worse for the union, whose contract to represent the state-funded home careworkers expired last year. It has not been able to negotiate a new contract with Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, who is proposing to cut state spending across the board to address an estimated $6.9 billion budget deficit.
The union is attacking the governor and pushing the state lawmakers to pass legislation that would increase the providers’ hourly rates to $15 from an average of $13 and to require them to attend more mandatory training programs that would be provided by the union.
“These people do the Lord’s work and the least we could do is to give them a raise,” said state Sen. Michael Hastings, D-Tinley Park, the chief sponsor of the bill during an April 5 state Senate hearing.
It is opposed by Rauner’s administration, which says the higher pay rates will cost the state an additional $73 million annually and the extra training would cost an additional $13.6 million.
“The union cannot get what they want through collective bargaining so they’re trying to get it through the legislature,” said Kristina Rasmussen, executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
Critics of the legislation argue that raising the pay rate will simply result in care recipients getting less. Pam Harris, an Illinois caregiver and the plaintiff in Harris v. Quinn, notes that the way the program works is that the care recipient is technically the one receiving the state subsidy. They then become the employer and work out a contract with their caregiver. Forcing the pay rates higher for the caregiver means that the care recipient is therefore likely to receive fewer hours of care.
“The increase to no less than $15 an hour will result in a decrease of supports and services. There is no assurance in this bill for families that their loved ones will not lose critical support or where the funds are coming from to raise wages without harmful cuts to services,” Harris said.
A spokesman for the union did not respond to a request for comment.
The union, a state branch of the Service Employees International Union, organized the homecare workers in 2003 shortly after the election of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat. The providers, who are funded in part by Medicaid, take care of disabled people, usually family members, at their homes, and receive subsidies to offset the cost. Prior to 2003, the state policy was that providers were not state employees and therefore not eligible for unionization.
That changed after Blagojevich took office. The union, then called SEIU Local 880, had been one the governor’s leading campaign funders and had close ties with his administration. One of Blagojevich’s first actions was to issue an executive order reversing the state policy and stating that the providers were eligible for unionization. Two weeks later on March 17, 2003, his administration certified SEIU as the provider’s sole representative.
Any person who signed up as provider for either program was automatically enrolled as a union member, with the state automatically deducting membership dues from their paycheck and remitting them to the union. Many providers never even realized they were union members until they saw the deductions, Harris said.
A Washington Examiner investigation in 2014 found that Illinois could not provide any documentation that it had ever verified the union’s claim in 2003 to have majority support of the workers. Blagojevich is currently in federal prison after his 2011 conviction on 17 counts of corruption related to his duties as governor and is not scheduled to be released until 2024.
The union’s own federal filings indicate that a substantial portion of its membership involved people who did not want to be there. A 2013 Labor Department filing said that it had 93,000 members total. However, 37,000 of them — more than one-third — were “agency fee payers,” meaning that they had declined regular membership and were paying the minimum they were legally required to.
Harris v. Quinn involved whether state-subsidized Illinois homecare providers who took care of the mentally disabled, a different group than the workers the SEIU represented, were eligible to form a union. The court ruled that the workers were not state employees and therefore the state could not be forced them to support a union if they didn’t want it. The ruling meant in effect that SEIU had to honor member’s requests to leave.
The union still could try to get caregivers to sign up voluntarily as members. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, the state instituted a new policy requiring that new providers had to attend a two-and-a-half-hour mandatory training training session to qualify. The entity that would provide the training was the SEIU, which was even given a half hour of the session to specifically pitch the benefits of union membership. The union now wants the state to pay for an additional $13.6 million in mandatory training programs each year.
