Illinois Home Health Care Workers to SEIU, AFSCME: Nope.

Illinois’s home health care workers have rejected an attempt to unionize providers under the auspices of SEIU and AFSCME. From CBS Chicago:

Illinois workers who are paid by the state to care for severely disabled people in their homes have voted down an effort to unionize.

More than 3,000 home health care workers mailed in their ballots this month; the ballots were counted on Monday and most of those workers voted not to join a union, according to Alan Symonette, an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association, which counted the vote.

The workers could have voted to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees or the Service Employees International Union, but more than half of them voted to remain non-union.

Michelle Malkin has the vote totals:

SEIU – 293 votes

AFSCME – 220 votes

NO UNION – 1018 votes

In July, Governor Pat Quinn signed an executive order allowing home care providers to join unions and negotiate for higher pay.

Why the resounding “no” vote? Ask Pam Harris, a provider for her disabled son: “Union contracts talk about suspension, probation, training, days off? It’s ridiculous, to draw a line from a Union to my own efforts to provide a meaningful life for my child.”

As pointed out by Rachel Culbertson, labor policy analyst at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, taxpayers could have been stuck footing the bill for new, costly union middlemen and higher wages. Culbertson argued that the unionization of home health care workers would be “almost certain to raise costs in the midst of the state’s budget crisis.”