Category: All News

We’ve long argued that the major state and national unions like SEIU, AFSCME, and the AFL-CIO have been doing a poor job recently in representing their workers. Free to Serve members across Pennsylvania, in fact, tell us that very thing. So it’s encouraging to see news this year out of Philadelphia that shows the little guy can fight the big corporate union—and really shake things up.

What’s up with SEIU lately? The national union, with its 1.9 million members and massive Washington, DC headquarters in stylish DuPont Circle, has recently been facing one scandal after another.

In the year after the Janus ruling, each Pennsylvania union saw membership grow nearly 5 percent. AFSCME now has 52,883 members, while SEIU has 16,507.

Last week, in a Pennsylvania capitol press conference with Mark Janus, the national nonprofit law firm the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) unveiled a class-action lawsuit aimed at reclaiming fair share fees that state employees in AFSCME Council 13 recently paid.

The latest contracts for Pennsylvania state workers are slowly being made public, and as the Fairness Center noted this week, two additional unions have dropped the narrow 15-day window during which workers could resign.

Newly negotiated contracts with some 78,000 Commonwealth employees and their unions are slowly trickling in. In June, we reported on how a worker lawsuit against SEIU Local 668 prompted the union to drop the contract requirement that members resign only during a 15-day exit window.

Americans for Fair Treatment Director Keith Williams has an encouraging editorial at TribLive.com about the importance of principled courage—even when you’re in the minority.

I have been a state employee for 18 years. Since 2009, I’ve worked at a Berks County state hospital represented by SEIU 668. For that entire time, I and my co-workers have watched our contracts get worse  and our union leaders  lie and  brush off rank-and-file concerns. 

Today marks one year since Janus v. AFSCME, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck a victory for government worker rights by banning forced union dues. This month, Americans for Fair Treatment is also looking back on a year of fruitful work since we ramped up our outreach efforts with our Free to Serve project.