Westrom revises unionization claims
Last week, PoliGraph gave Rep. Torrey Westrom a false rating for his claim that in-home child care providers who are not allowed to vote on whether to unionize will be forced to pay fair-share dues.
That's because Gov. Mark Dayton has been clear on how he wants his executive order allowing child care providers to unionize to be executed: no one would have to join the union if they don't want to, and because day care providers are not considered public employees, they would not have to pay fair share dues.
Westrom's claim was made in a letter to constituents on Dec. 2.
But in a second letter dated Dec. 15, Westrom is revising his claim. Here's what he wrote:
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I would like to correct an inadvertent error made in the December 2nd letter regarding how the childcare union election may affect you. The second paragraph of that letter should have stated: "All child care providers may have to live with the decisions of a union, but only the 4,287 providers who receive state subsidies will vote on its formation. The other 7,000 providers may be forced to pay "fair share" union dues, and could be subject to additional regulation, even though they were denied the right to vote in this election.
You can read the rest of the letter here.
Westrom makes reasonable arguments that Dayton's executive order does not guarantee that the unions won't try to collect such dues in the future, or necessarily prevent a court from deciding in the future that such dues could be collected (see the comments section of the previous PoliGraph post).
But despite that uncertainty - and PoliGraph agrees that there are some important unanswered questions about how unionization would play out - right now, we know that those who don't want to be in the union won't have to pay dues because they are not considered public employees.
PoliGraph will be keeping tabs on the issue to see if that changes.