How MD Dems Reward Unions

Here’s a good question: You are a small business owner. You run a home day care business located at your own private residence. Your only employee is yourself. You try to help out some of the less privileged in your community, so you accept “purchase of care” state subsidies for one impoverished family in your neighborhood. Under these circumstances, do you feel the need to belong to a union?

Whether you feel the need or not, Governor Martin O’Malley has decided that you are now required to be represented by card-carrying union members. Under a 2007 Executive Order, your union representation is mandatory and this past fall he selected Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500 to hold the exclusive rights to represent you under state collective bargaining. Now the General Assembly is considering legislation that would allow Local 500 to require all of these home day care workers to pay "agency fees," also known as mandatory union dues.

With the loss of an industrial base in the United States, unions have seen steeply declining membership in the manufacturing trades. Democrats are fearful that this will result in a correspondingly significant decline in campaign contributions and election organizers from unions. So Democrat legislators have worked to boost new arenas of union membership in the current strongholds of elementary and secondary school teachers, higher education, public safety, hospitals and other service industries.

O’Malley and the one-party monopoly in Annapolis has been at the forefront in passing pro-union legislation for collective bargaining and mandatory dues for a wide-ranging assortment of public and non-public employees.

But is this going too far - entering private residences to force day care providers to unionize and pay mandatory dues? Marta Hummel Mossburg of the Maryland Public Policy Institute explores this topic in commentary published in the Frederick News-Post. To read her op-ed entitled “Union Power Grab,” click here.