Former SEIU Promoter Now Teaches Home Healthcare Providers to Quit

This press release was the best news yet that I had read from the Freedom Foundation.

More home-care parents are rising up against the SEIU's bullying, forced coercion for membership because of the Medicare funding which parents receive to care for the children with multiple disabilities.

Check out the efforts of Benjamin Olsen, a former union cheerleader who now fights the union which is robbing him:

Benjamin Olson has seen the issue from both sides and he knows which is telling the truth.

That's why these days he's working to inform other home-based healthcare providers like himself of their right to opt out of union dues and fees.

Home-based healthcare should be free from government wrangling and union pilfering.

Parents taking care of sick and disabled children should not have to fight with bureaucrats, too.

Olson, featured in a new series of television ads running on local cable systems in the Seattle and Puget Sound region starting this week, used to see things differently. In fact, he was such an enthusiastic supporter of SEIU 775, which represents Washington homecare providers in collective bargaining talks with the state, that the union deployed him to persuade other providers to sign their membership cards.

This kind of story scares unions more than anything else.

When leaders and promoters start to realize that unions do not care about their members, but only care about themselves, they try to stifle, shame, then marginalize these opponents.

Let's face the facts: unions stopped caring about their members the moment that they force prospective employees to join them.

It's doubly shameful that unions want to take down a family man who is fighting to get the best care for his son,

That all changed, however, when SEIU 775 included him on a bus trip to Olympia to lobby Washington state lawmakers on behalf of the union's political agenda.

He was struck by how little of what the union spends its time doing had anything to do with the issues he and his wife Tammy faced every day caring for their son Sean.

How about that?

Of course, those of us who have been attacking this corrupt underbelly of labor unions have known about the abusive misuse of membership dues for years.

Years!

Then he heard from the Freedom Foundation about a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said home-based healthcare and childcare providers were not state employees in the conventional sense and could no longer be compelled to join a labor union.

Bingo!

With the Freedom Foundation's help, the Olsons opted out immediately … then started helping others do the same.

The move saved the family $2,000 a year in dues.

"Having the union take our money was a real hardship on us," Tammy Olson says during the TV spot.

Isn't that terrible?

Unions which claim to respect the needs of the members and their families were more interested in taking their money for their own special interest entitlements!

And power

"Now we use it on things that matter to our family," Benjamin Olson explains, "like groceries, gas and medical bills."

"The union hasn't helped us, and we're better off without them," Tammy Olson said.

I want that line broadcast all over the country. End forced unionism, and end the corruption of Big Labor robbing working families.

"Benjamin and Tammy's story is so powerful, and yet it's typical of what we hear from care providers every day," said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe.

It's powerful and moving. Unions are supposed to help workers, not hinder them. They are supposed to build up team membership and support their families.

Instead, unions misappropriate their funds.

"All they want to do is take care of their loved one," he said, "and under Medicaid, the state allocates a bit of money to money to help defray their costs. But when the union sees a pile of cash, it doesn't care what it was intended for. All that matters to the union bosses is how they can cut themselves in for a piece of it."

Since 2014, more than 10,000 caregivers in Washington and Oregon have opted out of the union, and that number grows every day as more and more of the barriers erected between the unions and their members are eliminated.

May their numbers increase. This is how states in otherwise liberal regions break the stronghold of corrupt special interests.

"When people hear the truth, they want no part of the union," McCabe said. "That's why the union is so desperate to keep these people in the dark, and why Benjamin Olson and the Freedom Foundation are so determined to tell them the truth."

Amen to that!