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(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)
The full text of the amendment that Proposal 4 would add to the Michigan Constitution is available here. In short, Proposal 4 would enshrine collective bargaining rights for home health care workers in the Michigan Constitution, together with recreating an agency of government to oversee them that was defunded earlier this year.
It sounds good and progressive, but the underlying story is more complicated. The standard model of unionization assumes that a large group of employees, working for a single employer, bargain collectively in order to level the playing field. Home health care workers, however, are independent contractors employed by individual patients, who are paid (at least in part) by taxpayers through Medicaid. Apparently, "many" of the home health care workers are actually family members of the patients, who use the taxpayer support to enable them to devote more time to care.
What's even more worrying is that, allegedly, only 20% of home health care workers took part in the original unionization vote, which was held without much publicity.
Given that the home health care workers are so dispersed — independent contractors working for individual patients — unionization does not seem like the right path for either increasing the quality of care or the employment standards of the workers. Rather, it looks like mostly a way to siphon money off for union dues. It doesn't seem to me that the home health care workers will have many common issues or concerns that a union can address.
And so, unless someone can tell me what benefits home health care workers get from the union — benefits that justify embedding this program in the Constitution — I recommend a NO vote on Proposal 4.
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