Posts tagged SEIU 775

    OPINION: Union Politics Is Poisoning Washington’s Business Climate

    April 23, 2026 // Between 2021 and 2026, Washington fell from #16 to #45 in the Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index, a dramatic drop that signals a rapidly deteriorating business climate. Meanwhile, the cost of living has surged. The Washington Roundtable now ranks the state among the five most expensive in the country. This did not happen by accident. It is the direct outcome of a policy agenda backed by union money and enacted by elected officials who benefit from it: higher minimum wages, expansive paid-leave mandates, new healthcare requirements, and an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

    WATCH: Questions about solvency, union membership remain regarding WA Cares

    November 16, 2025 // Opponents of WA Cares argue that the program is not primarily designed to help all Washingtonians, but rather to benefit unions like SEIU 775, which advocates for more taxpayer-funded caregivers, particularly regarding the possibility of family caregivers being required to pay some of their income to a union. “We still don't have clear guidance on whether or not family members are going to be allowed to opt out of union representation,” said Elizabeth New, director of the Center for Health Care and the Center for Worker Rights at the free-market Washington Policy Center think tank. “They say that they will be. But I've been waiting for it for a couple of years now, and I keep asking at every opportunity.”

    WATCH: Questions about solvency, union membership remain regarding WA Cares

    November 13, 2025 // Opponents of WA Cares argue that the program is not primarily designed to help all Washingtonians, but rather to benefit unions like SEIU 775, which advocates for more taxpayer-funded caregivers, particularly regarding the possibility of family caregivers being required to pay some of their income to a union. “We still don't have clear guidance on whether or not family members are going to be allowed to opt out of union representation,” said Elizabeth New, director of the Center for Health Care and the Center for Worker Rights at the free-market Washington Policy Center think tank. “They say that they will be. But I've been waiting for it for a couple of years now, and I keep asking at every opportunity.”

    WA political committees raise $66M, spend $52.8M ahead of 2025 general election

    November 2, 2025 // The SEIU 775 labor union, which represents over 55,000 health care workers across three states, has a PAC called SEIU 775 Ballot Fund. That committee raised and spent the most out of any other PAC so far this year, with $7.1 million in contributions and $2.8 million in expenditures, according to the PDC. The labor union also registered several other PACs in Washington state this year, according to the PDC.

    TWO BILLS PASSED BY WA LEGISLATURE EXPOSE UNION HYPOCRISY ON PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PRIVACY

    May 3, 2023 // One bill, HB 1533, creates a process for public employees purporting to be “survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, harassment, or stalking” to exempt any information about themselves from being disclosed to people seeking government records under the Public Records Act (PRA). Meanwhile, the other bill, HB 1200, requires government employers in the state to regularly turn over the personal contact information—including home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses—of their employees to labor unions. While the two bills are at odds in their substance, the common thread is that they both advance public-sector unions’ goal of being the only nongovernmental organizations with the ability to communicate with public employees. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 upheld public employees’ First Amendment right to refrain from joining and paying dues to a union in its Janus v. AFSCME decision, government unions in Washington and around the country have worked overtime to make signing up for membership as easy as possible while making cancelling membership unnecessarily cumbersome. Part of the approach has involved attempting to silence the Freedom Foundation’s efforts to communicate information to public employees about their rights while simultaneously increasing unions’ ability to communicate for the purposes of soliciting membership.

    THREE LAWSUITS, ALL INVOLVING UNION FORGERY, APPEALED TO SUPREME COURT

    December 22, 2022 // In all three cases, dues continued to be deducted from the plaintiffs’ paychecks long after they requested to opt out because the union claimed they had signed a membership form stipulating they could only leave during a two-week annual window. In fact, none of the workers had signed any such authorization and, when the unions were forced to provide documentation, each turned out to be a crude forgery. Zielinski v. SEIU 503, Wright v. SEIU 503, Cindy Ochoa,