Portside

GOP courts blue collar voters but most favor anti-union ‘right to work’ laws and reject laws that would protect right to organize.

Pro-worker provisions introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer added to the bill include penalizing employers for interfering in union elections.

The rule is "a blatant political attack on a group of workers that are 90% women and majority people of color,” said April Verrett, president of SEIU Local 2015, which represents some 380,000 California home care and nursing home workers.

In Connecticut, the good news is that anti-labor Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision won’t break the unions, which uphold the middle class at a time when the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled in barely more than a generation.

A rule proposed recently by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, under the Trump administration, would prohibit home health aides who are paid directly by Medicaid from having their union dues automatically deducted.

Medicaid authorities have launched a new attack on unions serving home healthcare workers. Make no mistake: This is nothing but another step in a 40-year attack on public employee unions.

The Oregon lawsuit was supported by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is handling some 200 other cases across the country, including a class-action lawsuit in California by 30,000 state employees.

The votes by members of the Maine State Employees Association and the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees are a victory for Republican Gov. Paul LePage.

As more states feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage by their right-to-work neighbors, the pressure only increases to follow suit and enact their own right-to-work laws. And after a while, a national right-to-work law might not be far behind. “I suspect that will happen within the next decade,” says Marquita Walker, an associate professor of labor studies at Indiana University.

Many of the 112,000 active educators and school workers in the Michigan Education Association can now leave the union and stop paying fees under a state law that took effect last year. Other major unions, covered by multi-year contracts, won't reach the opt-out point until 2015 or later.