NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE H ow did the greatest nation on Earth — indeed, the greatest nation in human history — end up on the fast track to national decline? That’s a question I’ve wrestled with a lot since I came to America from my home in England. Great Britain too was once a global power. Today, it is a shell of its former self. Its empire is long gone, and so are the jobs and opportunities. A country that once bustled with industry is now overrun with socialism and urban blight. Trade unions were the principal cause of its national decline. From mid century through the 1970s, they brought Great Britain to its knees.

Here in America, I see our country on a path similar to what Great Britain trod during the 1960s and 1970s. This country is racing toward socialism and everything that entails: autocratic government, fiscal and moral bankruptcy, and national decline. Just as in the U.K., the root cause once again is government unions.

Government unions have systematically rigged the game in their favor, giving themselves lifetime employment at a ruinously cost, while delivering less and less every year to the citizens they supposedly serve. Today, these pigs have nearly eaten themselves to death: Government unions have become so greedy and so unaccountable that the system itself is on the brink of collapse.

Every year they steal from individual public employees over a thousand dollars each. What else would you call it when an entity forcibly takes money from someone who doesn’t want to give it to them? An involuntary donation? There’s no need for euphemism. Stealing is stealing. And it gets even worse. They’ve actually started forging signatures on union membership cards.

The Freedom Foundation is currently pursuing 15 forgery cases — a number that is sure to rise — against government unions. One of those 15 cases involves Kristy Jimenez.

Kristy lives in Yakima, Wash. She takes care of her son, who is battling cancer. Since 2015, she has been paid to do this by Medicaid dollars so that her son can remain at home, under his mother’s care, rather than be institutionalized. Washington, as we have seen, was one of the states that forcibly unionized these care providers — without permitting them to vote on whether or not they wanted to be unionized.

So while Kristy never signed up with the Service Employees International Union, the laws of the state of Washington mandated that she pay dues. Recall that in 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with our friends at the National Right to Work Foundation and the Liberty Justice Center in Illinois and handed down Harris v. Quinn, which ruled this rip-off by the SEIU illegal. The high court saw this for what it was: a moneymaking scheme hatched by the unions and made possible by liberal state legislatures and governors whose campaigns are funded by the SEIU and its ilk.

Harris v. Quinn meant that Kristy and thousands of caregivers like her did not have to pay dues to the SEIU. There was one big problem, however: No one was going to tell them. The State of Washington wasn’t going to break the good news, and the SEIU sure as heck wasn’t going to let them know. As my predecessor Tom McCabe used to say, unions treat their members like mushrooms. They keep them in the dark.

Fortunately for Kristy Jimenez, the Freedom Foundation has made it our sole mission to tell her and every other public employee that they have the right to stop paying union dues — and we guide them along every step of the process. Kristy and those in the same boat received mail from the Freedom Foundation that included an opt-out form. By signing it and sending it in, she would be able to stop paying union dues.

She did so in 2020. But there was a catch. The SEIU refused her request, on grounds that the razor-thin opt-out window for union members who no longer wished to be union members had closed. Kristy was puzzled. A union member? She had never signed a union card. Yes, dues were being deducted from her paycheck, but she’d never officially joined the SEIU. The Freedom Foundation, championing her cause, requested a copy of her membership card. What we found was stunning. The card authorizing these deductions had been “electronically signed” in Seattle.

My initial thought was that this arrangement was totally lopsided. The union can use electronic membership cards to opt people in at any time, but it won’t recognize a request to opt out unless the form is mailed or hand-delivered in a two-week window during a 52-week year. But that wasn’t even the biggest problem. You see, Kristy rarely goes to Seattle, and she could prove that she wasn’t in Seattle on the date in question.

Can you say fraud?

The Freedom Foundation sued the SEIU and attached RICO claims to her case. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, is the law that prosecutors use to go after the mob. It’s entirely appropriate in Kristy’s case. The SEIU is acting like a desperate mobster, and judges need to consider these fraudsters in the context of organized crime.

Apparently the SEIU had forged Kristy’s signature and then used it to prevent her from leaving the union and taking her dues with her. Her lawsuit is still wending its way through the courts. Our best-case scenario is a decision that will rock the government unions and place them in the same category as the criminal mobs, but even if we don’t get that result, the bottom line is that this lawsuit will cost SEIU many millions of dollars in legal fees and probable penalties.

Kristy’s case is not unique. The incidents of forgery are adding up, and we are pursuing each and every one. For instance, when Staci Trees, an employee of the Oregon Department of Transportation, requested her release from SEIU 503 in the wake of Janus in 2018, she was informed by the union that, because she had signed an automatic membership renewal form in 2016, she would have to keep paying dues until the next opt-out window. Staci was puzzled; she had never signed such an agreement. When the union finally produced a copy, it turned out to have been signed by someone else, and important personal details on the form had simply been made up.

In these and other instances, one lesson is clear: The unions are getting desperate. They have become so powerful and extracted such a huge share of the resources we provide to the government in taxes that our system is on the brink of collapse. This cannot continue. America cannot survive much longer with government unions having more control of government than voters and taxpayers do. Our kids inevitably will be left to pick up the pieces of the unions’ reckless reign of fiscal terror.

For all its problems, America is light years better off than the U.K., and I was proud to take the oath of citizenship and make this my homeland in 2021. As someone who came here legally from another country, it’s easy for me to see opportunities that native-born citizens take for granted. And I’m living proof that the “blessings of liberty” are still alive here in this country we love. But I can’t help but see echoes of my native Great Britain here in the United States. Ending the undue influence of government unions is the most important thing we can do to restore the basic functioning of government in our country — before it’s too late.

This article is adapted from the book Freedom Is the Foundation.