The skim

Nice work if you can get it:  just think how much trouble it would be to go into 50,000 homes where family members were receiving Medicare/Medicaid subsidies for taking care of disabled loved ones, and force them at gunpoint to cough up 30 bucks a month.  How much more convenient to have your governor help you set up a sham election that results in all of these people being deemed employees of the state who have joined SEIU Healthcare Michigan.  Now their union dues can be painlessly deducted from their Medicare/Medicaid checks.

The only fly in the ointment?  After the governor leaves office, someone passes a right-to-work law, and 80% of your ungrateful, disloyal "members" leave the "union."  You might ask, but aren't they giving up fabulous collective-bargaining benefits purchased with all those dollars?  It turns out that SEIU Healthcare Michigan spent most of the money on lobbying, especially on lobbying to keep the skim going and even to enshrine it in the state constitution.  Not outright, of course; these things have to be handled discreetly:

Federal data shows that a majority of those funds in 2012 went to spending on union political activities and lobbying, not collective bargaining.  The union was fined more than $200,000 in March by the state for violating campaign finance laws 2012, the second-largest in state history.  The spending was primarily to back a state ballot initiative which would have codified the union's arrangement with MQ3 in the state constitution.  The union used a front group called Home Care First to conceal its spending.

Nearly half of the states now have right-to-work laws.  Just twenty-six states to go.