Caregivers leave Midwest union in droves one year after Harris v. Quinn

The decline underscores how many of those people likely never wanted to be in the union — called SEIU Healthcare Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas — in the first place.

The union, which originally claimed about 60 percent of the caregivers in the state subsidy programs covered by the case as members, now represents just 30 percent. The decline has cost it an estimated $5 million in member dues. That’s despite an aggressive effort by the union to retain those members.

“That’s a pretty significant reduction for them. Of course, that means that there’s $5 million more that are still with the providers,” said Kristina Rasmussen, executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative nonprofit.

An SEIU spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Most of the caregivers are people taking care of family members in their own homes with the help of Medicaid-funded state subsidy programs.

The Supreme Court case involved whether participants in three such programs were state employees and therefore could be unionized if Illinois signed a contract with a labor group on their behalf. Only two of the three programs had been unionized.

In a 5-4 decision in June 2014, the court said the caregivers were not state employees. Even the liberal justices who dissented agreed on that point. They opposed the ruling due to broader issues raised in it regarding public-sector unions.

The ruling did not mean that the caregivers could not be members of SEIU, though. They were free to sign up on their own initiative. Rather, what the ruling did was to end the state’s practice of automatically deducting “fair share” union fees from their paychecks even if they had not joined. The union said the fees paid for collective bargaining on the caregivers’ behalf.

Prior to the court’s ruling, SEIU Healthcare Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas said it had about 94,000 members spread across the four states. Only 57,000 of those had signed up as full members, though, according to financial disclosure reports filed with the Labor Department. The remaining 37,000 people, more than one-third, were agency fee payers.

The union’s most recent federal disclosure report, made in July, says it now has 64,000 members overall, a loss of 30,000 people in a single year. It also no longer says it has any agency fee payers.

The Illinois Policy Institute obtained through a state Freedom of Information Act request records request union membership data just for the caregiver programs. The data shows that at the time of the Supreme Court ruling, the union received fees from all 25,000 caregivers in the program that covered care for the physically disabled and just under 10,000 in a child care subsidy program, for a combined total of 35,000. A third Illinois program, involving caregivers for the mentally disabled, was never unionized.

Those numbers fell to 14,000 and 8,000, respectively, by September, for a combined total of 22,000. That has resulted in $5 million less in revenue for the union. The union has made it up in some other areas. Its current overall annual revenue is $37 million, down $2 million from last year.

Interestingly, the union had about 12,000 of the Illinois childcare providers signed up as full-time members by October 2014, only to have the number slide back down over the last year.

The union is still making efforts to sign up the caregivers as full-time members.

“Members of our union have continued to talk to non-members — going door to door, via phone calls and other means — to express the importance of having a voice on the job and increasing membership in order to improve conditions for workers,” SEIU spokesman James Muhammad told the Illinois State-Journal Register in August.

Pamela Harris, a Chicago-area caregiver for her son Josh and the lead plaintiff in Harris v. Quinn, sees it differently.

“What I continue to see is the union scrambling in whatever they can to continue a funding stream.”