The door-to-door union killers: rightwing foundation takes labor fight to the streets

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/10/union-killers-freedom-foundation

The Freedom Foundation says its goal is to offer choices, but union leaders say it’s part of a conservative effort to flip Washington and Oregon from blue to red

The door-to-door union killers: rightwing foundation takes labor fight to the streets
Steven Greenhouse in Seattle
Thursday 10 March 2016 07.00 EST

For several months, Shawna Murphy, a home-based childcare provider in Seattle, had received a stream of emails, letters and robocalls – some two dozen of them – telling her she had the right to stop paying union dues.

Then early one afternoon, while the six children in her charge were napping, a man with a briefcase knocked on her door. At first Murphy thought he was a lawyer, but then she realized he might be a state inspector of childcare providers. So she opened the door.

“He said there’s this supreme court case that will impact me, and he pulled out this leaflet and told me that I don’t have to be part of the union and don’t have to pay union dues,” said Murphy, a member of the Service Employees International Union. “I told him, ‘I’m a proud supporter of the union, and you can leave now.’”

The man was one of the many foot soldiers in a highly unusual offensive against public-sector unions in the US north-west. A conservative foundation, the Freedom Foundation, has dispatched activists to visit the homes of more than 10,000 childcare and home-care workers in Washington and Oregon to advise them that under a two-year-old supreme court decision, they can opt out of paying union dues.