Jackson Jambalaya

So you don't have a college degree, don't have much money, but you want to open your own business and have a crack at the American dream? Good luck if you are in Michigan and want to open a day care center, for thanks to a sweet deal the unions made with the state, day care employees are now considered unionized and are forced to pay union dues. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece yesterday on this latest theft by the unions:

"Michelle Berry runs a private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the birthplace of General Motors. "The Berry Patch," as she calls the service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment rate.

Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it's happening elsewhere in the country.

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees..."

They were able to pull this off through something that should give EVERY supporter of school vouchers pause:

"Of course, Michigan's independent day-care providers don't work for anybody except the parents who were their customers. Nevertheless, because some of these parents qualified for public subsidies, the Child Care Providers "union" claimed the providers were "public employees." Column, WXYZ story

What the unions don't realize is that if the day care centers quit accepting the vouchers, then they probably are not considered public employees anymore and can quit the union. One more example of the law of unintended consequences. However, the union orks don't stop with impressing unsuspecting small business owners into their Mafia but have set up some pretty sweet deals for themselves as well. Labornotes.com reports:

"According to data filed under the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), the number of union officials and staff earning high salaries has skyrocketed in recent years. For example, the number of individuals earning over $100,000 a year more than doubled between 2000 and 2004—the latest year with complete data. Over the same period the number of officers and staff earning more than $150,000 increased 84 percent....

In 2004, for example, 5,646 union officials or staff raked in a total of $733.6 million in salaries over $100,000, including multiple salaries, while 870 pulled down $181.7 million in salaries over $150,000.

Looking at total compensation, which includes things like meal and housing allowances as well as reimbursements for other union-related expenses, the numbers are even larger. In 2004 there were 9,036 officers and staff who collected more than $100,000 in union funds, for a combined total of more than $1.2 billion. Setting the bar at $150,000, we find 1,662 individuals who took home a total of $335 million..." Article

The Detroit News published even more unsettling details:
"Workers who kept their jobs saw the disparity between their paychecks and those of their union bosses grow. The pay gap between the state's 50 top-paid labor leaders and union workers has grown by $18,000 since 2002 -- an economic chasm expanding by almost $10 a day. Records supplied to the Labor Department by the unions themselves show that the state's 50 top-paid union officials now earn an average of $186,000. More than 1,000 labor officers and staffers in Michigan made more than $100,000 in 2006, more than twice as much as the average union worker...." Article

I wonder if Joe Atkins will mention any of this in his next column?