SEIU Lobbies White House, Joins Phone Calls to Threaten California

The White House brought in SEIU to help muscle California, according to a report from Investors Business Daily:

After decades of decline, Big Labor now has reason to be optimistic about the future: It has fast friends in the White House.

California officials recently learned just what that meant when they tried to trim the pay of state health workers. A top union got the administration to tell California to back down.

The debt-ridden state had sought to trim $74 million from its budget by reducing its contribution to home health workers’ pay from $12.10 an hour to $10.10.

The Obama administration subsequently told them in an April 15 conference call that if the wages were cut it could endanger $6.8 billion in federal stimulus funds.

Also on the call were the Service Employees International Union’s associate general counsel and two California union officials, one a lobbyist.

The SEIU had lobbied the administration to step in. Many of the workers are SEIU members.

“We found what the Californians were doing was in violation of the law,” SEIU President Andy Stern told IBD on Thursday. “We were asked by the administration to join a conference call to explain our legal position on this.”

He argued that under the terms of the stimulus the state had no right to make the cuts.

California Secretary of Health and Human Services Kim Belshe told the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the story, that the union’s presence was “unusual at best.” […]

SEIU is a key institutional member of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaire leftists’ club that seeks to radically transform America.