They've probably stopped clapping.Credit: SEIU International / photo on flickrWhat can we extrapolate about the state of unionized labor in America when 80 percent of one group’s members dropped out in a single year once presented the opportunity to do so?

That’s what happened in Michigan. That hard-fought right-to-work law gave home healthcare workers the chance to choose whether Service Employees International Union (SEIU) would actually represent them. Home healthcare workers, who are often family members of the patients they serve and sometimes not even actually paid, were forced by the state beginning in 2005 to accept SEIU as their bargaining representative and pay them dues, which were deducted from state Medicaid checks for the people the workers were serving.

Now that Michigan workers have been granted the right to refuse union representation and decline to pay union does, the home care workers are showing SEIU Healthcare Michigan the door. According to federal reports examined by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 44,000 home care workers have dropped their membership from the union, leaving just under 11,000 members.

Fox News interviewed a couple who had been forced into the union while caring for their own children and had little good to say about their membership. The husband is a retired Detroit police officer. How bad do you have to be to lose them?

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