Spokane, WA — Spokane-area TV viewers will get a sense this week of the depths government employee unions will sink to when it’s a question of preserving their government-enforced monopoly and the funding it represents.
Local stations will begin airing a Freedom Foundation-produced commercial telling the story of Andrea Henry, a Washington state resident and an employee of a nonprofit healthcare facility unionized by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 775 several years ago.
When she began her job, Henry understood union membership to be a condition of employment, and thus signed a membership card and paid regular monthly dues.
But she was never comfortable with the arrangement, and her discomfort turned to horror this past year when she discovered a portion of her dues was being donated to Planned Parenthood, whose values and activities were deeply offensive to her beliefs.
Henry attempted to declare her status as a religious objector under the federal Civil Rights Act, but the union make the process unreasonably complicated – even demanding she submit a biographical profile of her pastor in order to probe his motives.
By law, the union is required to respect the religious objections of its members and allow them to donate their dues instead to an approved charity that doesn’t offend their values. But apparently SEIU officials don’t believe the process should be easy or painless.
Fed up, Henry and her husband came to the Freedom Foundation for help and, within weeks, the union dropped its resistance and recognized her civil rights.
“Andrea’s case is a classic illustration of the unions’ priorities,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe. “They claim to represent the best interests of the workers. But when those interests conflict with the union being able to skim the millions of dollars it uses to fund a liberal agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with the working conditions of its members, the union leaders are only too happy to trample even their basic civil rights.”
The commercials are scheduled to air on cable stations including FOX, ESPN, TNT, TBS, CNN for the next week.
