With the Detroit auto industry floundering, the United Auto Workers is turning its attention to…day care provider. And to do so, the UAW partnering with the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, a union that organizes workers in the one sector where unionization is growing: government. That’s because some 40,000 Michigan home day care providers have now found themselves classified as working for the state.

Home care providers are government employees? Defining them as such is a novel strategy…

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Slate blogger Mickey Kaus explains how public sector unions are driving state and local governments to the brink of bankruptcy (via Nick Gillespie at Reason Hit & Run, via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):

The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. “[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes,” as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key…

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In his Wall Street Journal column today, Holman Jenkins highlights one of the prizes at stake for organized labor in the current health care debate.

Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health -care benefits they’re used to getting. More important and often overlooked, organized labor itself is increasingly made up of health-care workers who benefit from an incentive system that artificially force-feeds great gobs of GDP into the industry’s maw.

Their long retreat elsewhere in the economy may continue unabated, but…

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Remember the California budget debacle? Now it seems like not a month goes by without another state facing a budget crisis. Now it’s Michigan’s turn. Predictably, state politicians are trying to scare the public with talk of cutting funding for libraries and prisons, in order to make tax increases an easier sell. Also predictably, policy makers appear to be avoiding looking for budget savings where substantial ones could be realized: government payrolls. As The Detroit News points out:

Employee pay and…

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