Unions Got Their Money's Worth
The unions got their quid pro quo from Congressional Democrats in this session for the millions of dollars the unions spent on their election to power. The Democrats have cut back funding on a key oversight agency for unions, helping their partners to become more opaque in their political projects and to allow corruption to twist the collective bargaining for their members:
Within the last several weeks, the AFL-CIO’s second-in-command sent letters to major accounting firms asking that independent auditors give a more thorough going-over of corporations’ financial disclosures and stock options grants. The unions are for disclosure, and they mean business (or would that be “anti-business”?).Yet at the same time, union-funded politicians in Congress are successfully pushing forward in their campaign to slash the budget for the Department of Labor agency responsible for overseeing how union leaders spend their members’ money. Think of this organization — the Office of Labor-Management Standards — as the SEC for unions. ...
More importantly, OLMS investigates abuse of dues money and monitors compliance with accounting requirements. It’s getting the job done. Since 2001 the courts have ordered restitution of $70 million in OLMS criminal cases. That’s real union money that union bosses are really trying to keep covered up.
Perhaps union officials and their allies in Congress are embarrassed about what the public finds in the union financial disclosures overseen by the agency.
Perhaps. They always seemed beyond embarrassment in their relentless support for Democrats in elections, even when Republican policies generated economic growth and investment -- and jobs. The Democrats offer the ability to dodge transparency, however, and that has more allure for union bosses than a growing economy, which explains why workers have increasingly rejected unions over the last few decades.
The OLMS points out far too many "inconvenient truths", as one Democrat might put it. For instance, it reported that only 43 of 643 union audits showed financial compliance. That's a whopping 6%, meaning 94% of all unions can't pass a financial audit. It doesn't seem very surprising, since millions of worker dollars end up at the Democratic Party. If a group of publicly-held corporations had a 6% failure rate for their financial audits, the Democrats and unions would scream bloody murder, let alone a 94% failure rate.
Why do Democrats want to reduce federal oversight while unions have a 94% failure rate on their audits? Wouldn't that indicate a need for more oversight, and perhaps some investigations into potential fraud and other criminal conduct? If not, what kind of failure rate would Democrats need to see before enforcing the law and protecting the American worker? 95%? 96%? 100%? Or would that not be enough, either, to keep Democrats from giving their union partners a pass?
Posted by Ed Morrissey on October 22, 2007 10:02 AM | Comments () | TrackBacks (3)
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