SEIU’s Illegal Plan to Unionize Small Businesses Imposes Heavy Costs

The SEIU has a nefarious new plan to unionize small businesses: classify franchisees as big businesses.

Steve Caldeira offers an excellent summary of this new strategy and explains how it is not only illegal but unfair to small businesses because, along with their multi-city effort to classify small, locally owned stores associated with national chains as big businesses, the SEIU is pushing a raise in the minimum wage.

This would mean that small businesses with only handfuls of employees would have to implement significant wage hikes in the same amount of time as a company with 500 employees and significantly more revenue.

For example, Seattle’s new minimum wage ordinance allows businesses with over 500 employees three years to implement the new wage hike while granting seven years for smaller businesses. If SEIU has its way, local franchisees of large companies like Subway will have to implement a $15 per hour wage hike in the same amount of time as a business with over 500 employees.

To the point I made in my last piece, it is a sad fact that unions, America’s most prominent worker advocacy groups, are often so anti-business and even anti-worker. Big Labor apologists like David Macaray argue that Big Labor just needs to do a better job marketing themselves but that is clearly not the problem, considering the massive amount of money that unions put towards political spending.

The fact is that the union model is broken – it’s a relic of the 1940s and 1950s when the workforce was less fluid and the low level of private sector union membership shows that. Modern day labor unions are also deeply connected to the Democratic Party and too involved with radical Progressive politics to appeal to the average American worker.

Organized labor in America is in desperate need of reform and that probably starts with replacement of a leadership which believes that the key to increasing membership is more politics.