Cook County Blog

This is from an article published in late September at the Edison Norwood Times Review -by Alan Schmidt titled "Resurrection Health Care workers rally for right to unionize".

Resurrection Health Care employees and members of AFSCME Illinois Council 31 held a 36-hour vigil outside Resurrection Medical Center over the weekend to end what organizers characterized as an "an aggressive anti-union campaign."

What it really is - is Resurrection's "aggressive anti-union campaign" is comprised of personnel who have some common sense. Governor Pat Quinn passed executive order 0915 which must be revoked in order to stop the coming Illinois union disaster. This "protest" is an orchestrated campaign to shove this socialist agenda down the throats of patients and doctors and destroy our healthcare system.

I'll get to the trouble with unions in a moment.

Employees at the health-care organization, which runs eight hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and other facilities across the Chicago area, have been trying to form a union for the past several years. The vigil, staged across the street from the Northwest Side hospital, at 7435 W. Talcott Ave., was sponsored by Healthcare Employees Acting at Resurrection Together -- HEART -- and Council 31.

All of this sounds wonderful, doesn't it? An organization that calls itself "HEART" what could be wrong with that? But it doesn't take long to figure out that there is something terribly wrong here. The SEIU and AFSCME have apparently partnered together. SEIU/AFSCME and ACORN (Yes ACORN) are inexcorably tied to Obama's Healthcare Plan and the push for socialist healthcare.

SEIU and AFSCME are pushing across this country to unionize -not only hospitals and nursing homes-but force home healthcare workers - many of whom are parents of children or relatives of family members who are disabled. Just think about that for a moment; if a man doesn't want to wipe his disabled child's butt can he go on strike?

Here is an article that is written by a nurse at the American Thinker which recounts her experience.

My first article for American Thinker was titled "Welcome to ACORN General Hospital." I wrote that Barack and Michelle's healthcare vision seemed to be hospitals as agents for community organizing. At the time I thought I was indulging in a little hyperbole. Little did I know that I was right on the money.

We should remember the problem with community organizers - our Lawyer-In-Chief is one of them; and community organizing is what put pressure on the banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them - which in turn, created the financial crisis that we're in. Government should never be relied on as 'the answer'.

In an article at the Globe, The Trouble With Unions -bg George Leef-George puts it into perspective with an example of uionizing healthcare workers in Los Angeles:

The root of the problem is that unionism is rooted in coercion rather than consent. Workers can't just sign up for union services like they would for, say, an Internet service provider, staying with it as long as they're satisfied that they're getting good value for the money.

Instead, the law makes the choice of union representation into a collective decision by majority vote that's binding indefinitely. Most American workers who have union representation have never even had the chance to vote on keeping that union, and if they don't like it, all they can do is quit.

No other private organization in the United States has the authority to compel people to accept its services. Americans love freedom of choice, but the laws -- laws that unions fought to get back in the 1930s -- have set up a system that gives union officials monopoly power.

This system gives union heads great power over the people they claim to represent. They might accomplish some good for the workers, but they also might do things that are detrimental.

The history of union abuses is a sad and bitter one. Sometimes officials have decided to sacrifice jobs rather than allowing wage or benefit cuts that would save the company. Sometimes violence has been unleashed against individuals who criticize the union. Sometimes workers have had large amounts of their dues money squandered by officials who use it to live high on the hog. Very often workers are compelled to pay for the political activism of the union officials, funding candidates they don't agree with.

A recent case illustrates why many Americans want nothing to do with unions.

Due to the cooperation of Los Angeles County politicians, a local of the Service Employees International Union was declared to be the bargaining representative for more than 97,000 home healthcare providers. Most of them were care-givers for elderly family members. They weren't asked if they wanted union representation. Union-backed politicians just declared that since the people were being paid by the government, the union should ''represent" them.

The care-providers suddenly found themselves paying union dues for services they didn't want. To top it off, when some of them complained about this sweetheart deal, it turned out that SEIU was illegally charging them more than the amount allowed. Carla West, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys against SEIU, said that she resents the fact that union officials want to make off with a chunk of the money that should be going to care for her elderly mother.

A settlement in the case required the union to repay nearly $8 million in illegally seized dues.

It was a great mistake to have enacted the laws that transformed unions from voluntary associations into monopolies with quasi-governmental authority. But it isn't too late to change the law. We just need more lawmakers who believe that union representation should be voluntary, never coerced.

This is just one example of why Resurrection Hospital must continue to resist the Union Thugs of AFSCME, ACORN, SEIU and HEART. We don't need that nightmare here.