OLYMPIA, Wash. – Tacoma resident Rosetta Horne, in a new television ad airing locally, lays bare once and for all the myth that public employee unions care about anything more than their own political clout and the leftist agenda they advance with it.
Horne, who is reimbursed by Medicaid for the home-based healthcare she provides to her disabled mother, was told by SEIU 775 she had no choice but to join the union and allow it to siphon off a portion of her paycheck if she wanted to participate in the program.
“They lied to me,” Horne says in the TV ad, produced by the Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based free market think tank. “The union told me I had to join them if I wanted to provide care for my mother.”
Worse, Horne was dismayed to discover the union was using the dues money she didn’t want to pay in the first place to fund organizations like Planned Parenthood, whose activities directly contradicted her own strongly held Christian convictions.
“Forcing someone to fund a cause they don’t believe in … that’s just wrong,” Horne says.
Years later, SEIU sent her a letter, warning her about the Freedom Foundation. But rather than taking its message at face value, Horne was skeptical of the union’s claims. So she reached out to the Freedom Foundation and spoke with Matt Hayward, the organization’s Freedom in Action Washington coordinator, who explained that she had a First Amendment right to stop funding the union.
“I learned the truth and took back my freedom,” Horne tells viewers of the commercial.
“Rosetta’s story is so powerful – and so representative of what’s at stake in this struggle,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe.
“All she wants to do is care for her mother,” he said, “but the union that claims to represent her interests doesn’t give a damn about her. All she is to SEIU 775 is an ATM from which it can with withdraw hundreds of dollars every year. And there are tens of thousands of Rosetta Hornes all over Washington state being bled for millions of dollars by the union using its dues-confiscation scheme.”
The commercial concludes with Horne directing viewers to a Freedom Foundation created website, OptOutToday.com. The ad can be viewed here.
