EDITORIAL: Fight back against Trump’s attack on unions and home health care workers

If federal income taxes were not taken out of paychecks, you can bet that tens of millions of workers would fail to set aside enough money each year for Uncle Sam.

Tax Day, April 15, would be a disaster.

For the same practical reason, money commonly is taken directly from workers’ paychecks for health insurance, pensions and union dues.

Now, though, in yet another attack on organized labor, the Trump administration has decreed that Medicaid payments to home health care workers — essentially, their paychecks — no longer can include a direct payment of union dues. Although there is no question the workers are voluntarily union members — they signed up — they won’t be able, as of July 1, to pay their dues by means of a simple deduction.

The Trump administration purports that the new rule, which overturns a 2014 Obama administration rule, is about nothing more than adhering to the letter of federal law.

But its real motive — busting unions — is transparent.

The new rule marks the latest in a series of right-wing assaults on unions, including last June’s landmark Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME. In that case, a 5-4 majority of the Court restricted the ability of unions to collect dues from public-sector workers.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents some 500,000 home healthcare workers, recently announced it will challenge the new rule in court. Both SEIU Local 1 and SEIU Healthcare have ownership stakes in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Attorneys general in five states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington — are taking the administration to court, too, accusing the White House of trying to “reinterpret the Medicaid Act in service of anti-union objectives.”

We urge Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose office says he is “evaluating” the matter, to do the same.

As we see it, permitting the direct payment of union dues from a home health care worker’s Medicaid paycheck is no different in principle than deducting union dues from a firefighter’s paycheck. There should be no double standard.

The new rule is insidiously discriminatory in that it targets low-wage workers in a field, home health care, that is dominated by women and minorities. Ninety percent of home health care workers are women, more than 50% are women of color, and 1 in 4 are immigrants.

These are workers who, given an average annual wage of just $23,100 as of 2017, don’t even always have a bank account or credit card. It might be easy for President Trump to, say, set up a monthly payment to a golf course, but typically it is not so easy for a home health care worker to arrange a regular payment for union dues.

And that, for anti-union zealots, is entirely the point: To create yet another way to starve organized labor out of existence.

The bad joke here is that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medical Services, the federal agency that promulgated the new rule, never actually singles out union dues by name. The agency, feigning ideological neutrality, has simply announced a ban on “third party” payments from Medicaid.

But nobody is fooled.

“Organizations like the National Right to Work Committee and the Freedom Foundation lobbied the Trump CMS to repeal the Obama policy,” Robert Bruno, director of the Labor Studies Program at the University of Illinois-Chicago, told us. “The Freedom Foundation’s avowed goal is to destroy public employee labor unions. Period. They issued a letter shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Janus case that said the goal was ‘take unions out of the game for good.’”

America is getting older. Baby boomers are anything but babies. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the demand for home care — somebody who can feed, bathe and dress people who cannot do it for themselves — will increase by as much as 41% from 2016 to 2026.

Those workers deserve a better deal, and unions are helping them get it. While the average pay across the nation for home health care workers is a meager $10.49 an hour, it is a minimum of $15 for unionized workers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington State and Los Angeles. In Washington State, unionized workers now have a retirement plan.

In Illinois, unionized home health care workers were among the leaders in advocating for the $15 minimum wage signed into law in February by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Nobody will ever get rich caring for those who cannot care for themselves, but why is the Trump administration so eager to keep them poor?

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