SEIU’s Brand Of Socialism

More money for a few, higher unemployment for the many.

Have you noticed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) never backs tax measures that would send revenues directly to residents? SEIU only wants revenues to flow through governments that — you guessed it — pay SEIU members.

That’s SEIU’s brand of socialism. It wraps itself in populism — “Tax The Rich!”— to appeal to voters and secure new taxes to generate more revenues for government employees who are members of SEIU. These funds are directed through government structures managed by politicians under SEIU’s influence.

SEIU has 750,000 members in California, less than 4% of the state’s workforce. The vast majority of California’s nearly 20 million workers benefit more from private sector demand for their services than from an SEIU-sponsored tax. Whenever SEIU succeeds at boosting taxes, money is extracted from the private sector that could otherwise boost demand for private sector workers. It’s not a coincidence that California’s unemployment rate leapt to the highest in the country over the same period that California’s government spending on SEIU and other public sector union members exploded.

The antidote is well-organized political opposition. We saw that recently in San Francisco, where voters turned down an SEIU-backed revenue measure that was presented as a tax on the wealthy but in reality would have served primarily as a new revenue stream for its members.

Don’t be fooled by SEIU’s appeals to populism. SEIU is a business operating in California for the benefit of 750,000 shareholders at the expense of 40 million residents.