Later today, protesters will march in Chicago under the guise of demanding a job-destroying and economically calamitous $15 minimum wage. But that’s not the whole story when talking about SEIU’s motives:
May 23, 2017
Protests Today Designed To Boost Labor Membership, Not Help Workers
Later today, protesters will march in Chicago under the guise of demanding a job-destroying and economically calamitous $15 minimum wage.
But as The Wall Street Journal notes this morning, there is an ulterior motive here for big labor groups like SEIU that have poured millions into funding this effort:
“The SEIU is groping towards a new model—trying to come up with other ways of helping workers beyond their own narrow membership,” said Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University public-policy professor who worked in the Labor Department during the Bill Clinton administration. The Fight for $15 “helps raise the union’s profile and their political clout. It also raises the question of: How are they going to pay for it?”
Dwindling union membership and tight budgets for organized labor could make it difficult to support an effort that yields little benefit to most union workers, who typically earn well more than $15 an hour.
A deeper dive from The Washington Free Beacon found that SEIU has actually poured $19 MILLION into different committees to fund “Fight For $15” activities and spent over $60 MILLION in 2016 to try to elect liberal politicians.
This kind of massive spending makes it painfully obvious…SEIU is supporting the Fight For $15 efforts so that they can try and cultivate a new swath of dues-paying members to fund their far-left political activities.
From a policy standpoint, a $15 minimum wage would eliminate 7 million jobs and increase costs for families across the board. SEIU wistfully ignores these realties in order to try and rebuild a political operation that will do the bidding for an out-of-touch agenda that only hurts American workers.