I’ll direct you to an excellent op-ed by James Sherk in the Strib yesterday.   It’s about the lunacy of the AFSCME daycare jamdown bill, passed last week and signed by Governor Dayton.

You should read the whole thing – it’s as good a digest of the absurdity of the bill as I’ve read, and I’ve read them all.

But the important part is “where does this go?”

The most likely place is “to court”; the daycare providers have already started working on a lawsuit to enjoin the law from going into effect.

And for the providers’ sake – and the sake of the kids who are going to lose daycare, and the families whose daycare budgets are about to get gang-raped by fat guys in AFSCME T-shirts – I hope the suit works.

But this is Minnesota, where you can reliably count on courts to find some picayune reason to uphold the left’s status quo ante.  So what happens if the courts don’t spike the law?

Sherk looks to history:

In 2006, the SEIU persuaded then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm to let them organize Michigan home-care workers reimbursed by Medicaid. Most of these home-care workers are family members caring for disabled relatives. This saves the state money by avoiding expensive institutionalized care, while enabling parents to care for their disabled children.

These home-care workers made strange candidates for unionization. Parents certainly weren’t going to go on strike against their children. But Granholm allowed the SEIU to mail ballots for an organizing vote. Most parents ignored the mailers; fewer than one-fifth sent them back. However, the SEIU mobilized its supporters and won a majority among those who voted.

Which is exactly what AFSCME and SEIU (which is angling for a piece of the Personal Care subsidy) are hoping; that, and flooding the market with “providers”, including unlicensed childcare providers who haven’t provided in years, but will vote for the union.

Perplexed parents soon began seeing union dues deducted from their Medicaid checks. The union charged families hundreds of dollars a year without providing any services. One father complained to a reporter:

“We’re not getting anything from them [SEIU]. We’ve tried to contact them, and they don’t even bother to respond. I don’t even know what they could do to help. Considering the dues money we’re sending them, maybe they should come over and baby sit our kids so we could have one night out.”

The situation didn’t last. Corruption charges forced the president of the Michigan SEIU local to resign. After Gov. Granholm left office, the Michigan legislature terminated the program.

Unions need to modernize and adapt to the 21st-century economy. But forcing disadvantaged families to pay dues out of their government benefits is the wrong approach. Unions should reinvent themselves to provide services modern workers value, not tap into money meant for children and the disabled.

But when you have a two-chamber majority and a compliant governor, tapping is so much easier.

If you’re a Minnesotan who provides, or uses, home daycare?  Or is, or uses, or knows a personal care assistant – whether an indy, a family member or a regular worker – whether the courts throw the law out or now, you need to remember this come next year.

The legislators who gave us this abomination need to pay at the polls.