During a blitz of freakishly cold weather, the women came to witness nine judges hear the arguments in the case of Pamela Harris v Governor Quinn of Illinois.

A decision in Harris’s favour would have a major impact on the quality of care provided to tens of thousands of senior citizens and people with disabilities who rely on state-supported home care services.

It would do this by ruling the collective agreement covering more than 27,000 workers (the vast majority of whom are female and from minority groups) unconstitutional, thus undermining the stability and professionalism in the sector.

More broadly, a ruling that the current system is unconstitutional threatens the future of public sector collective bargaining across the country.

Funded by the right-wing lobby group, the National Right to Work Committee (NRWC), Harris is challenging the requirement for homecare workers to contribute towards the cost of the collective agreement covering their work.

In what is known in the US as a ’fair share’ provision, Illinois homecare workers are not required to join a labour union – in this case, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – but must make a contribution as they benefit from the wages, conditions, access to training and support negotiated by the union for all Illinois homecare workers.

Harris works in a separate non-unionised area of homecare and has never made a contribution to the union.

She has, however, been happy to become the public face of a case which aims to deunionise the state’s homecare workers while undermining public sector collective bargaining across the country.

The minimum wage in the US currently stands at just $7.25. Workers at the nation’s largest private company, Walmart, earn so little that their employer holds a ’canned food drive’ instead of paying them a living wage.

In these circumstances, collective bargaining is one of the few tools that low and middle-income workers have at their disposal to raise wages, improve safety standards and to secure benefits like healthcare and pensions.

 

The ‘union avoidance’ industry

It’s for this reason that trade unions and collective bargaining has long been the enemy of hard-right conservatives in politics, business and academia. In the United States the ’union avoidance’ industry is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Captive audience meetings, where workers are forced to attend and hear management’s anti-union message, are both legal and commonplace.

For home care workers like Flora Johnson from Chicago, the case threatens to dismantle a programme that serves 30,000 people with disabilities.

“One of those people is my son,” says Flora. “His name is Kenneth, and he was born with cerebral palsy. Many years ago, I was told that Kenneth would need to be sent to an institution for his long-term care. But home care allowed Kenneth to remain at home with our family.

“So many mothers in my position have faced an awful choice: stay at home to care for a child with a disability, or see them forced into institutions. Many of those mothers simply couldn’t afford to stay home if home care didn’t pay a decent wage."

Currently, the State of Illinois pays for senior citizens and people with disabilities to receive home care from a provider of their choosing. This can be from an agency, an individual or a family member.

The collective agreement secured 11 years ago by Flora and other workers through the SEIU ended the revolving door in the industry, providing professional training, health care and salary increases.

Although Harris wants to continue receiving state payments for caring for her son at home at the negotiated level, she doesn’t want to contribute to the cost of maintaining the collective agreement.

For Rayhnee Patrick, whose acute full-body psoriasis has left her confined her to a wheelchair and in need of home care, the agreement has brought stability and professionalism to the industry, allowing her to continue to live and work independently in her home.

“During the ‘Polar Vortex’ storm I had a personal assistant come to me at five o’clock in the morning in my house,” says Rhaynee.

“She rode an hour in the snow, from the North Side of Chicago. Why was she so dedicated? Not because I’m lovely, but because she gets a really good wage, and the wage came from the unions being able to collectively bargain. I can actually go to work, and it’s because of her being able to pay her own bills that I’m able to pay my bills."

 

A war against collective bargaining

For the NRWC, this case represents a golden opportunity in an ongoing war against collective bargaining and unions.

Emboldened by the march of Right to Work legislation into 24 states across America, including former union heartlands like Michigan, they are eager to press their case before what is widely considered to be a conservative Supreme Court.



Right to Work legislation has become a key tool of far-right ideologues in their drive to deunionse the entire country.

In legislating for individual contracts, undermining collective bargaining and ending ’fair share’ provisions, it is targeting the upward pressure of unions in a system designed to push down on low and middle-income workers.

And it has been brutally successful to date – union membership has declined, while inequality has widened and become so entrenched that the ‘land of the free’ is now one of the most unequal societies in the world.

Only seven other home care workers out of more than 27,000 have joined Harris in the case, but the NRWC and a host of other conservative groups have stepped in.

With their support, the case has continued all the way to the Supreme Court, despite previously being struck out by two lower courts.

The Illinois government estimates the existing system has actually saved the state US$632 million, making it clear that the support of the NRWC, and others, isn’t driven by fiscal prudence but by ideology.

 

Beyond the US 



Unions are seriously concerned that a Supreme Court rules in support of would undermine the entire system of public sector collective bargaining, reducing the ability of unions to successfully negotiate with employers.

Over time, with neither the mechanism nor the funding to fight for workers, carers, their clients and their family members will suffer.

So why does this matter beyond the US? Because right across the globe ideological conservatives and free marketeers in politics, think-tanks and parts of the media believe that where America goes, the rest of us should follow.

While fair share provisions don’t exist in many countries, there are many other protections written into national laws – on issues like workplace rights, wages and safety standards – that can be targeted to cripple unions and collective bargaining.

In Australia, for example, Tony Abbott’s conservative government has wasted little time in using the US playbook, attacking working people and even companies that don’t treat their workforce with hostility.

Already it’s begun to have an impact, with the Australian airline Qantas recently making its pitch for government assistance by trumpeting its hard-line industrial policies during the grounding of the airline in 2011.

The real winners in this race to the bottom are the vested interests who stand to benefit financially from any erosion of workplace rights and the libertarian culture warriors who sleep with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged under their pillows.

Back in the US, the Supreme Court justices heard the case for a little over an hour and are now deliberating in private, with a decision expected by June.

For Flora Johnson and everyone who braved the elements to take their message to Washington, what’s at stake couldn’t be clearer:

“Thirty years ago, home care workers in Illinois made as little as one dollar per hour. You simply can’t make ends meet on so little. That’s why we decided to organise and form our union.

“We can’t afford to go back to the bad old days — the days when home care workers were living in terrible poverty, and when seniors and people with disabilities were forced into institutions because they couldn’t find consistent care."

A slightly different version of this article was originally published on Working Life