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Labor Department makes rules to expose union corruption

Will Obama make it easier for union officials to commit crime?

By: Soren Dayton (Diary)  |  January 18th, 2009 at 06:36 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

From Paul Pringle at the LA Times:

The U.S. Labor Department, in the final hours of the Bush administration, has toughened standards to require most unions to publicly report nearly all compensation and expenses for officers and employees, the agency announced Friday.

Also broadened were disclosure requirements for the sale and purchase of property, with the aim of revealing whether any union officers or employees profit from the transactions.

In the alleged SEIU scandal, the Los Angeles-based local’s former president, Tyrone Freeman, has been accused by the union of enriching himself and his family with more than $1 million in misappropriated dues money. The SEIU ousted him after The Times reported on his spending practices last summer.

Los Angeles based Freeman has been at war with Sal Rosselli from the Oakland local of SEIU. Sal thinks the rules are a good thing:

An SEIU dissident, however, said he welcomed further disclosure. Sal Rosselli, president of an Oakland-based local, has feuded with the SEIU’s national leadership over the direction of the union. He said the national office has refused to fully disclose how much money it has spent on the internecine fight.

“Transparency on how unions spend their members’ dollars, from our point of view, is wanted,” Rosselli said. “We let our members look at every check.”

The real question is whether Obama and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who represents … Los Angeles and is a close ally of Freeman, will dial these back for their corrupt buddies.

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  • Achance

    The past is prologue. Among the first things WJC did was rescind GHWB’s Beck order requiriing dues objector notice to employees of federal contractors and those working on federally funded jobs. The Clinton Administration simply did not enforce the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (often called the Landrum-Griffin Amendment to the NLRA), so such financial reports as were filed at all, were works of fiction. When GWB tried to restore enforcement and disclosure, the Democrat controlled Senate put language in the federal budget prohibiting any expenditure on LMRDA enforcement.

    And, more to the point, the only big union the LMRA/LMRDA really catch is SEIU and the now fairly small trades and crafts and industrial unions. The big public employee unions, NEA, AFSCME, all the state associations, bargain under state laws and are not subject to federal regulation at all. Most in fact are subject to little or no regulation at all. The have a national umbrella organization that is a non-profit corporation and each local is essentially a franchise chartered by the national. The locals are just state chartered non-profits subject to little or no regulation. Under the NLRA/LMRA, if you say you are a union and can get 50%-1 employees to vote for you, you’re a union.

  • cookcountyconservative

    Obama is tied at the hip with these union thugs – according to the this WSJ article of 12/21 – the unraveling of these rules are already in the works:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122990431323225179.html

    “From day one of the Obama era, union leaders want the lights dimmed on how they spend their mandatory member dues. The AFL-CIO’s representative on the Obama transition team for Labor is Deborah Greenfield, and we’re told her first inspection stop was the Office of Labor-Management Standards, or OLMS, which monitors union compliance with federal law.

    Ms. Greenfield declined to comment, citing Obama transition rules, but her mission is clear enough. The AFL-CIO’s formal “recommendations” to the Obama team call for the realignment of “the allocation of budgetary resources” from OLMS to other Labor agencies. The Secretary should “temporarily stay all financial reporting regulations that have not gone into effect,” and “revise or rescind the onerous and unreasonable new requirements,” such as the LM-2 and T-1 reporting forms. The explicit goal is to “restore the Department of Labor to its mission and role of advocating for, protecting and advancing the interests of workers.” In other words, while transparency is fine for business, unions are demanding a pass for themselves.”

    My favorite paragraph in this article -

    “The Secretary should “temporarily stay all financial reporting regulations that have not gone into effect,” and “revise or rescind the onerous and unreasonable new requirements,” such as the LM-2 and T-1 reporting forms. The explicit goal is to “restore the Department of Labor to its mission and role of advocating for, protecting and advancing the interests of workers.” In other words, while transparency is fine for business, unions are demanding a pass for themselves.”

    and then this…

    “But union complaints about administrative burdens aren’t borne out by the LM-2s, which include their accounting costs. Compared to the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley, they’re hardly onerous. And one constituency is grateful that Labor makes this information public and, if necessary, prosecutes abuse: Dues-paying union members.