A union turns public dollars into political power, and political power back into public dollars. Each turn spins it faster. Here is the machine, across twenty-four years and three branches of government.
A flywheel is a heavy wheel that hates to move. The first push barely budges it. The tenth, it starts to roll. By the hundredth it spins on its own momentum and you can take your hands off. Jeff Bezos built a company on the idea, and the language of the flywheel has been business-school standard ever since.
SEIU 775 built a political machine on it.
Since 2016 the union has pushed $51.7 million into Washington politics.1 The candidates whose names sit on a ballot got $889,580 of it. Under three cents on the dollar. So the money is not buying politicians, or not mostly. It is feeding a wheel. This piece is about the wheel, and the quarter century it took to get it spinning.
One turn looks like this. Public dollars pay the caregiver. The state skims 3.2% of that wage and forwards it to SEIU 775 as dues. The dues fund the union's politics. The politics protect and widen the stream of public dollars, which widens the workforce, which widens the dues. Every rotation leaves the wheel heavier and faster, and a little harder to stop.
The plumbing on the WA Cares end of that wheel, the payroll tax on your stub, the daily dues files between the state's contractor and the union, the salaried lobbyist seated on the commission that governs the program, is laid out in our earlier report, The Closed Loop. Read it for the snapshot. This piece is about motion: how the wheel got built, push by push, and how fast it turns now.
The hub went in first. In 2001, voters passed Initiative 775 and created collective bargaining for home-care workers, the people who bathe and feed and sit with the elderly and disabled, mostly in someone's front room.2 Their wages came from Medicaid. The union chartered itself the next year off roughly 26k of them and set dues at 3.2% of gross pay.
Then the slow pushes, and most of them were losses. From 2007 to 2010 SEIU 775 spent against Tim Eyman's anti-tax initiatives, the ones that threatened the revenue feeding home care, and it went one for three. I-960 passed. I-1053 passed. Only I-1033 went down.3 Anyone selling you a tidy decade of ballot dominance is selling.
The pushes that landed added mass to the wheel. Initiative 1029 in 2008 and its do-over Initiative 1163 in 2011 each passed about two to one, and each ratcheted up training and certification for caregivers.4 Ask why a union writes its own licensing rules and the wheel answers: more credentialed workers, paid by the state, means a bigger base to skim. Milton Friedman flagged the move sixty years ago. Licensing sold as safety. Working as a cartel.
In 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court threw sand in the gears. Harris v. Quinn held that home-care workers are only partial public employees, so the state could not force them to pay.5 Dues went optional, and the skim started to leak.
A normal union, told its dues are now voluntary, asks members to pay. SEIU 775 went to the Legislature.
SB 6199, in 2018, told the state to hand its job as the caregivers' employer to a private contractor, the outfit that became CDWA.6 The logic is almost tidy. Harris was about public employees. Put the workers on paper as employees of a private company, and the ruling stops reaching them. The mandatory fee walks back in through a door the Court left unlocked. Sand out of the gears, fresh grease in the bearing.
Watch the rolls after that. Federal filings show the union flat to shrinking from 2020 through 2022, parked near 41k members. Then it jumps. Up about 10k in 2023, another 5k in 2024, to roughly 56k.7 The dam breaks the same year CDWA's fee machinery came on and the WA Cares payroll tax took effect. Both were union wins. Name both, because the filings will not let you hang the surge on either one alone.
Here is where the easy story breaks, in a useful way.
Figure 1 // There is no ramp. Eight years flat, then one near-vertical turn in 2024. The purple line strips out money the union shuffled between its own committees; the gap is the tell. Sources: PDC dataset kv7h-kjye; reconciles to $51.7M gross, $28.8M net external, 2016 to 2025.
There is no ramp. For eight straight years the wheel idled, one to four and a half million dollars a cycle, nothing that scares anyone. Then 2024, and it threw off $17.8 million in a single turn, nearly all of it to crush Initiative 2124, the measure that would have made WA Cares optional.8 The SEIU stack supplied 98.5% of the money that beat it, a breakdown we ran in full in The Closed Loop. The line does not climb; it sleeps, then it detonates.
The gap between the two lines is its own confession. The dark line is gross, every dollar reported. The purple line strips out what the union moved between its own committees. In 2025 that gap ate the chart: of $13.4 million gross, $9.5 million never left the building. It flowed into SEIU's own Ballot Fund.1 Read it straight. The real external war on I-2124 ran in one year, 2024, with $15 million out the door. The 2025 figure is mostly the wheel storing energy for the next turn.
The machine compounds, which is the whole point of a flywheel. Dues climbed from $7.6 million in 2003 to $54 million in 2024. Membership from roughly 1,600 at the founding to about 56k today.7 Each win that widens the publicly funded workforce widens the base, and the wider base pays for the next win. Hands off the wheel.
There is a precise term for this, and it is not a slur: Rent-seeking. It comes out of public-choice economics and means spending real resources to capture income through politics instead of earning it in a market. The 3.2% skim is the rent. The ballot campaigns, the licensing mandates, the employer-of-record swap inside SB 6199, all of it is the cost of guarding and growing that rent. None of it is a product a willing buyer chose.
The data does not say SEIU 775 runs the Democratic caucus. It doesn't. Business outfunds the Democratic field something close to five to one, and union-backed candidates have held a steady 15% or so of that field for a decade, with no trend pointing up. The union is not the broadest spender in Olympia. It never set out to be.
What it is, is the most focused spender in Olympia. It does not buy a Legislature. It defends one publicly subsidized revenue stream and keeps a few of the right people close, to make sure things stay on track. The $889,580 in candidate checks, the part that looks like ordinary political giving, is the receipt. The flywheel is the investment.