The state has dedicated $10 million of the 2025 state budget to minority organizations and businesses. The budget includes grant line items for what it calls “Michigan minority-owned business,” community centers, advocates, and social services.

Two of the grants listed as going to “minority owned business” do not specify which businesses are receiving $500,000 from taxpayers. The line item is in the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s Community Enhancement grants.

The line items state “Michigan minority business’ located in Lansing and Detroit will be offered ‘minority-owned business support.”

A third $2 million grant for a minority-owned business will go to Dunamis Charge in Detroit, an electric vehicle charger company. “Many are referring to the EV transition in the U.S. as the fourth industrial revolution,” the company’s website says. “As a manufacturer of EV charging solutions, Dunamis Charge and our investors could not have asked for a more robust business environment to launch our innovative and revolutionary EV chargers.”

Dunamis is currently raising funds for a pending patent that is fast-tracked for approval, according to a press release on Newsfile.

Other minority-specific grants include:

• $2 million to MI Minority Supplier Developer in Detroit
• $2 million to a LatinX Technology and Community Center in Flint
• $1 million to Chinatown in Detroit
• $750,000 to a Hispanic community center in Kalamazoo
• $750,000 to Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Sault Ste. Marie
• $500,000 to The Chaldean American Social Services Advocates in Beverly Hills.

The LatinX technology center is a nonprofit that also received $600,000 from a separate grant in the state budget. Sen. John Cherry, D-Flint, supported the funding, which will go to an early education center, according to News Channel 3.

Neither Cherry nor the community center responded to a request for comment.

The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe will use the money, including another grant from the Department of Health and Human Services for $500,000, to build an emergency center, according to the state budget.

Sen. John Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, secured the money for the tribe. He did not respond to an email inquiring whether he had ever donated his own money to the tribe.

The Chaldean American Social Services Advocates has no website. A Facebook page for the organization states it operates in Beverly Hills, Mich. Its Facebook page has 11 followers and says on its ”About” section that the organization is “Helping seniors & special need individuals obtain social service benefits that they are qualified for.” The first post on its page was in December 2022. It is unknown which legislator secured the money.

Michigan Capitol Confidential contacted El Concilio and confirmed that it is the community center receiving $750,000 from the budget. The center is running a capital campaign to open a multicultural services and program center, according to Adrian Vasquez-Alatorre, its executive director.

“The state budget funds will support our capital campaign efforts, finish the renovation of the new space for our preschool, after-school programs, direct services offices and collaboration spaces,” Vasquez-Alatorre told CapCon.

Unless legislators come forward after the budget is completed, it can take up to a year to learn which individuals were responsible for securing the state grants. Michigan law requires legislators to divulge within a year who is responsible for requesting earmarks. If no legislator comes forth, the receiving organization is in jeopardy of losing the funds.

The 2025 budget awards $1 billion in pork through earmarks that were added late in the budget process. These grants do not go through full vetting by the Legislature. James Hohman, fiscal policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, raises a range of concerns with earmarks: they allow individual legislators to handpick awardees; they undermine transparency in the budgeting process; and they are unfair to other organizations that would like to compete for public grants. Earmarks are usually written in a manner that conceals the recipients and skirts constitutional restrictions on pork projects.

As most Michiganders take a day off from paid labor, it is a good time to learn about workers’ rights here.

Unions have traditionally had a strong influence on labor policies in Michigan, though state residents did have a 14-year period during which they were not required to pay unions, even if they were employed in a unionized worksite. Things changed on Feb. 13, however, when right-to-work was no longer the law of the land for workers in the private sector.

Until 2012, Michigan’s laws heavily favored unions. Anyone who gained employment in a unionized facility had to pay union dues. Those who did not want to pay due still had to pay an agency fee, which was nearly as much as dues. Unions are required by law to calculate their political expenses and charge those costs to members, not fee-payers.

Public sector employees gained the right to be fee-payers by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, delivered May 23, 1977. Requiring a worker covered by a union contract to also pay the union for its political activity violates the worker’s First Amendment rights, the court ruled.

In 1999 the Mackinac Center for Public Policy published a report explaining labor law in Michigan. After the report came out, the state enacted and then repealed a right-to-work law, so some of it is obsolete. But the report still has a useful account of the state’s labor history.

During Michigan’s brief era of right-to-work, people had the power to refrain from union membership and fees, whether they were in the private sector or the public sector.

In 2018 public workers nationwide gained more freedom when the Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, ruled that unions could not compel workers to pay dues or fees. It said that public sector unions are inherently political organizations, so compelling payments to them would be to compel workers to engage in political speech.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, a pro-union president, opposed the idea of letting public sector unions organize. Roosevelt said public sector union strikes are “unthinkable and intolerable.” It was not until the John F. Kennedy administration that the federal government recognized unions.

While the Janus ruling frees public sector workers everywhere freedom from union mandates. the same is not true of those in the private sector. There, state law rules. In Michigan, that means mandatory agency fees for people covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

If you are a public sector worker and are being misled into believing you are required to pay anything to a union as a condition of employment, contact the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation. It will help ensure that your rights are protected.