Jeff RhodesYou can add yet another pair of prominent national voices to the chorus condemning Washington’s Initiative 1501.
On Sunday, Forbes magazine published an editorial that savaged the measure. Headlined, “Unions Resort to Election Trickery in Grubby Efforts at Maximizing Their Legal Plunder,” the piece – authored by government columnist George Leef – zeroes in on the initiative’s fundamental dishonesty.
On Monday, Bloomberg News followed with its own news story, “Caregiver Info Disclosure Measure on Washington Ballot,” making the same point.
While masquerading as a crackdown on identity thieves who target seniors, the measure is in fact, Big Labor’s latest harebrained scheme for “maximizing union money haul by stopping the dues leakage caused by Harris v. Quinn,” the Forbes column explained.
“The privacy and identity theft is just a cloak for what it is that the SEIU wants and that is to keep the Freedom Foundation from getting a list of the home healthcare workers who are union members,” said Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, in the Bloomberg story.
“Imagine the extraordinary expense that union bigwigs are happy to impose on others just so they can keep about 7,000 workers in the dark about their legal rights,” Leef wrote.
And when you’re imagining, remember the unions wouldn’t be spending a nickel of that money if not for the Freedom Foundation. I-1501, as has now been noted in the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and every major newspaper in Washington, is a direct assault on the Freedom Foundation’s outreach efforts.
Having been frustrated in its efforts to prevent the Freedom Foundation from advising home healthcare workers of their right to opt out of union dues and fees in the courts and the Legislature, I-1501 is SEIU 775’s last-ditch effort to keep its scam a secret by tricking voters into thinking they’re voting for something else.
It’s not just a local scandal, either. Attorney General Bob Ferguson has made Washington a national laughingstock by permitting the union to abuse the initiative process like this.
“The real but hidden purpose of the initiative is, of course, to enable the SEIU to continue engaging in what Frederic Bastiat accurately called ‘legal plunder,’ in his magnificent book The Law,” Leef wrote.
“Labor unions might find ways of improving the lives of workers,” he concluded, “if they had to compete for their support and allegiance rather than resorting to coercion and political chicanery.”
The entire Forbes column can be read here. The Bloomberg story can be read here.