You had to know this was coming with the rash of Republican attempts at union busting, and yesterday new rightwing Department of Human Services director and former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan announced the state will stop collecting union dues from 16,500 private day care providers and will no longer fund the agency in charge of their union.
Despite the fact that a majority of workers voted in a legal election and it was upheld in the courts, Corrigan did the bidding for the rightwing think tank the Mackinac Center.
In 2009 child care workers organized the Child Care Providers Together Michigan (CCPTM) union, a joint venture between United Auto Workers (UAW) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) certified CCPTM as the sole bargaining unit for all home-based child care providers receiving reimbursement payments from the Michigan Child Development and Care Program.
The Mackinac Center, and their allies in the conservative media and in the Senate GOP caucus, thinks it’s somehow illegal for a group of workers to vote to form a union, and the Mackinac Center filed a lawsuit claiming that because not everybody voted, the election is somehow invalid. The Michigan Court of Appeals rejected that ridiculous claim, twice, so they turned to the Legislature where the anti-union Republicans were very receptive. Still, they failed there, so with the stroke of a pen Corrigan undid a legally sanctioned election and what she could not accomplish on the bench or in the Legislature.
I’m assuming the Mackinac Center, knowing they would never win in court, will drop their losing lawsuit, and it’s unclear if the union will file a lawsuit, hopefully they will. It’s nice to know that you can undo an election with a simple stroke of a pen, so I want to see the 2010 election in Michigan undone, too.
