SEIU Continues to Bleed Members in Hard Times

It isn’t often you see a union screw up so badly that hundreds of its members jump ship all at once.

It’s certainly happened before. Case in point, the Freedom Foundation’s current lawsuit against CSLEA in which 130 lifeguards attempted to opt out in a single day.

But it’s still uncommon.

Unless you’re SEIU 1000, the largest union for state workers in California.

As we recently chronicled, SEIU has a leadership problem and has been bleeding members — more than 5,000 in the last two years. During the past three months, more than 900 SEIU 1000 dues payers have severed their connection to the famously terrible union.

But recently, and especially during June, public employees all over California are starting to feel the heat from COVID-related shutdowns.

Take, for example, city of Santa Barbara employees, primarily unionized by SEIU, where 400 employees are facing layoffs due to budget deficits.

Unions have long claimed they alone are looking out for public employees’ paychecks, but there’s a new sheriff in town — the individual employees are looking out for their own paycheck now.

In the past month alone, more than 1,200 public employees in California have responded to the Freedom Foundation’s outreach and parted ways with their union.

The message is simple — times are tough. Due to budget deficits, the failure of some of the most prominent unions in California to effectively bargain and falling tax revenues, public employees are looking at a bleak nearby future.

But you don’t have to keep paying the people who don’t give you anything in return. Opting out of union dues saves the average employee $800 per year and removes a small but meaningful amount of money from a private organization that never deserved it in the first place.

For this reason, we’ve sent hundreds of thousands of emails to public employees across California letting them know how to give themselves their own stimulus package.

On the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME (2018), we’re happy so many public employees are joining the celebration.