Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind

by Mallory Factor

  From sea to shining sea, cases have been discovered of union elections being rigged and stolen, keeping the membership from having a say in the direction of the union itself. In St. Louis, the police officers union set aside its election results after a secretary’s desk was allegedly found stuffed with blank ballots.19 The election, in which a challenger won over the incumbent by fifteen votes, was invalidated, and a new election held. The scrutiny this time ensured a cleaner process; the challenger won again and was installed as president.20

  Another case of alleged union election fraud occurred at a local union representing “academic student employees” at a public university in California. In a 2011 election, it looked like a group of reformers were about to win over the incumbent union officials. So the incumbent-friendly election committee reportedly simply cut short the vote count, disenfranchising half the voters. As the reform candidate for president lamented, “It’s hard to understand why else the current union administration would abandon the vote count without having counted nearly half the ballots cast in the election.”21 Eventually, voting resumed, and the challenger won—but only after the members brought pressure to bear.

  Union members who don’t think they have been disenfranchised in union elections probably aren’t watching closely enough.22 Just visit the Department of Labor’s website to see new examples of internal union election fraud reported. In November 2011, the Transport Workers Union of America allowed three board members to be elected who weren’t even in good standing with the union; the same month, the National Emergency Medical Services Association was sued by the Department for failing to hold elections required by law; in October, the Department went after the International Union of Operating Engineers for rigging the election rules. The list goes on and on.

  Some union officials may be willing to rig votes if necessary to get a contract approved or to stay in power. But they generally don’t have to—union members don’t vote in high numbers, and incumbents who control the union machine are better at getting their friends to vote than their challengers are. Participation rates in union elections are abysmal. For example, in 2007, only 22 percent of active union members voted in New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) election.23 But with 1,485 candidates running for 900 positions, whose name do you know on the ballot anyway? When Randi Weingarten was head of the UFT before moving up to become head of the American Federation of Teachers, she reportedly considered an election close when she received only 80 percent of the vote.24

  Taking from the Union Cookie Jar

  One of the most common types of union corruption that is actually uncovered is embezzlement. There are seemingly endless cases of union officials taking a little here and a little there, from the union cookie jar. Where extensive embezzlement is discovered, the national or international union usually takes over the local union, which is called trusteeship, in an attempt to rid the local union of corruption. Some have suggested that the parent unions sometimes expose corruption in local unions just to take over these unions and to put their own allies into leadership positions.

  Former secretary of labor Elaine Chao reported that during the George W. Bush Administration, her Labor Department brought over 1,000 indictments for union-related fraud and achieved 929 convictions.25 Many of the fraud cases discovered involve embezzlement, usually a union official taking $100,000 or less from the union cookie jar, often to feed his gambling habit.26 In other cases, like a recent New York City case, the theft can be a whole lot more.

  Melissa King administered employee benefits plans for the NYC “sandhog” union, the Laborers Union of North America. This local union represents subway diggers and others who work on underground construction projects. In 2010, King was charged with embezzling an almost unbelievable $42 million from the union.27 Although King pleaded guilty, she claimed that the amount she embezzled was exaggerated. But she did manage to use embezzled funds to spend an estimated $5.5 million on keeping fine horses for her daughter, over $7 million on her American Express bill, and other millions on jewelry and a Park Avenue residence before her theft was discovered.28 You know that there must be a lot of money available for the taking from unions if one person could embezzle tens of millions of dollars without detection for years.

  Since 2001, the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards has prosecuted union bosses for over $100 million in embezzlement of union dues, but these federal cases represent only a fraction of all union embezzlement cases. The real take is probably much, much higher.

  Union Hotel California

  One reason unions aren’t better run is that in general, union members can’t leave one union for a better union. Remember the lyrics to the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California”? You know—“You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave”? That’s the unions. Once unions organize a workplace, the workers are essentially trapped inside the union. “Unionization is not like joining a club or trying out a new Internet service provider, where you can easily quit or stop paying if you aren’t satisfied,” reports the Center for Union Facts.29 Union members are free to quit the union, but they can’t stop the union from representing them, and if they live in one of the twenty-two forced-dues states, they can’t stop paying fees to the union (which are the same or nearly the same as dues). If they try to stop paying the union, they will be fired.

  Once unions organize a workplace, the workers are essentially trapped inside the union.

  A union can hold elections every year to unionize a workplace if they can show enough interest by the workers; but once the union is certified, the workers can only throw out the union with great difficulty. Actually kicking the union out of a workplace is called “decertification” of the union. If decertification happens at all, it usually occurs to replace one union with another. For example, a rival union may raid the membership of another union, and then try to get the workers to decertify the old union and replace it with the new union. You might be able to trade your union boss for another, but you generally can’t throw off the yoke of unionism once it’s forced upon you.

  Legally speaking, the workers have a contract with their government employer, and the government employer itself has a “union security contract” with the union, which gives the union dues checkoff, the right to use workplace mails, and other valuable rights. But the workers themselves don’t contract directly with their union, and this severely limits their rights.

  As a result, many union members have little or no control over union dues, despite being given some rights under the Landrum-Griffin Act, as we discussed earlier. The Department of Labor tells workers that “union members have a voice in setting rates of dues, fees, and assessments.” Members may have a voice, but they generally don’t have a vote. For many unions, dues are approved by vote of the convention of delegates elected by the members, but do not require approval of the members themselves.30 Additionally, the unions can set special assessments, which is extra dues requirements, used for funding special political activities like voter initiatives—again generally by convention vote. So the union members have little direct control over their dues—and little recourse if they are dissatisfied with their union.

  Registering Voters the Easy Way

  “Okay,” you say, “so what? I’m not a member of a union, and what they do in the privacy of their boardrooms is their business.”

  There’s only one problem: it’s your business, too, when they fund political organizations that commit voter fraud to influence elections across the nation.

  Government employee unions spend vast amounts of money on voter registration drives around the country. And in at least some cases, this money seems to have been spent on extensive fraudulent registration of voters.

  In the U.S. Congress, a report issued by Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee explains that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) worked extremely closely with the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
on voter registration, get-out-the-vote, and other election efforts. The report lists many examples of allegations that ACORN submitted falsified voter registration cards and engaged in various other fraudulent political activities.31

  The congressional report shows that the SEIU has donated millions of dollars to ACORN across the country to do the political organizing work that it did so well. ACORN and the SEIU even shared office addresses, employees, and leadership in some cases.32 “SEIU and ACORN are financially and politically codependent,” the report stated. “Documents show the clear exchange of funds goes back and forth between the two organizations depending on who needs money at the time.”

  Although the SEIU is ACORN’s most well-known supporter, many of the other government employee unions also gave millions to support ACORN in its heyday—including the teachers unions, which contributed $1.3 million to ACORN since 2005.33 AFSCME was also an ACORN supporter, although the union’s support in one notable case failed to reach ACORN. The head of an AFSCME local union in Milwaukee pleaded guilty to embezzling $180,000 of union funds intended for an ACORN affiliate, which the union official used instead to fund her gambling habit.34 Our federal government supported ACORN, particularly with respect to its affordable housing subsidiary, Acorn Housing Corporation, to which it gave a reported $16 million from 1997 to 2007.35

  You will recall that the SEIU is probably the government employee union that is closest to President Obama. He has appointed numerous SEIU officials to White House jobs and commissions, including former SEIU president Andy Stern to the Deficit Commission, former SEIU associate counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, and former SEIU Local 1199 political director Patrick Gaspard as White House political affairs director.

  But Obama was close to ACORN also. Obama worked right out of law school at SEIU Local 880 in Chicago, which just happens to have been founded and run by ACORN. He later brought a lawsuit on ACORN’s behalf for increased access to the polls in Illinois. And his 2008 Presidential campaign paid an ACORN umbrella organization a reported $832,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts.36 So, while the congressional report concludes that “ACORN and SEIU work together as one corporate conglomerate,”37 we should bear in mind President Obama has worked closely with both organizations on voter registration efforts himself.

  Another of the report’s principal findings was “ACORN, as a corporation, is responsible for thousands of fraudulent voter registrations throughout the United States.”38 As the report strongly pointed out, “Responses from various state election offices show that ACORN’s late filings of voter registration cards and the sheer amount of fraudulent cards obstructed election administration efforts in many states.” The report emphasizes, “Fraudulent voter registrations are not isolated incidents; they reflect ACORN’s criminal motive to compromise the system of free and fair elections promised in the Constitution of the United States.”39

  ACORN in Action

  ACORN was a big player in the 2008 elections. After all, it had a big stake in Barack Obama’s election. Obama certainly didn’t forget his earlier benefactors when he geared up to run for president. In a speech to ACORN leaders in 2007, Obama gushed: “I come out of a grassroots organizing background… I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”40

  ACORN became important to voter turnout in many states in the 2008 elections. One key state was Nevada, a swing state. In 2008, the police received reports that there was fraudulent voter registration emanating from the ACORN Las Vegas offices. So they raided it. Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw “rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week,” with nearly half of those forms being “clearly fraudulent.”41

  Soon, local election officials noticed strange names cropping up in voter registration forms submitted by ACORN, including the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. It turned out that ACORN had hired prison inmates, some of whom had been convicted of identity theft, to supervise the voter registration effort. Some joked that ACORN was doing election fraud right—they had specialists doing the work.42 In April 2010, two top ACORN officials pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the Nevada case.43 It is reported that at least fifty-four ACORN officials have been convicted of voter fraud across the nation.44

  Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, declined to hold hearings on ACORN voter fraud, stating that he did not want to distract lawmakers from more important priorities, specifically passing health-care reform. The Las Vegas Review-Journal was scathing in its denunciation of Reid’s action: “Do Sen. Reid and congressional Democrats really believe that if they just ignore the big mess their pet bear has dumped in the middle of the room, it’ll somehow stop stinking?”45

  ACORN went belly-up before the 2010 elections—thanks to independent journalist James O’Keefe. O’Keefe busted ACORN in a sting operation in which he and colleague Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute and visited ACORN offices all over the country. At almost every ACORN office they visited, the ACORN officials offered them advice on how to hide their income and set up a house of prostitution using underage Latin American girls. In the ensuing furor, Congress voted to cut off millions in federal funding to ACORN and related groups, and ACORN declared bankruptcy. Within a year, the former leadership of ACORN had reportedly set up new front groups to carry on its mission under different names.46

  Conclusion

  The labor movement has a much longer and stronger tradition of questionable governance practices than corporations and other organizations. The Association for Union Democracy, a pro-union group aimed at protecting democracy within unions, explains, “In many unions democratic rights are as real and unquestioned as in most of American society. They are written into federal law, enshrined in union tradition, extolled by union leaders. But in large sections of the American labor movement these rights are trampled upon and must be restored.”47

  Securing the right of union members to control the governance of their union and eliminating the culture of corruption in the union movement should be the goals of any true friend of the labor movement, but this does not seem to be the direction in which the movement is headed.

  Unions remain some of the most secretive organizations in America. And the Democrats consistently protect union secrecy—keeping important information from union members and from the public. During the Bush Administration, then secretary of labor Elaine Chao increased financial reporting requirements for union officials, requiring them to report how much they received from the union and union trust funds.48 She also required shop stewards, union officials in the workplace, to file financial disclosures so that rank-and-file members could see how much stewards were getting paid for their union work. But President Obama’s Department of Labor halted these types of disclosures.49 Soon after President Obama entered office, Chao explained, “the new leadership at the Labor Department moved to delay implementing a regulation… that would have shed much-needed light on how union managers compensate themselves with union dues.”50 The regulations were designed to promote greater transparency and stop union fraud and embezzlement—and the Obama Administration stopped those regulations dead. Things are so much simpler and cleaner for the Democrat-Shadowboss complex when the little people and the taxpayers don’t know what’s up.

  But what about you? Yes, you, the nonunion member. The person who doesn’t work for the government, or even aspire to work for the government. Should you worry about any of this? Absolutely. The government employee unions have plans for you, too, as we’ll see next.

  Chapter 7 Summary Points

  Unions are secretive and undemocratic organizations.

  Numerous unions have been found to have irregularities in their internal election processes, usually designed to keep the exis
ting leadership in place against a challenger.

  Very low percentages of union members actually vote in union elections, making it easier for incumbent union bosses to turn out the vote for themselves and stay in power.

  Decertification of an existing union is extremely difficult, so union members don’t generally have the chance to get rid of the union if they don’t like how their union is handling matters.

  There are numerous documented cases of union officials and others engaging in embezzlement from unions, even involving tens of millions of dollars, which reveals not only corruption but also the huge sums of money that are run through unions.

  Congress has documented extensive financial and organizational ties between the SEIU and the now-discredited ACORN, which was involved in fraudulent registration of voters in the 2008 elections. President Obama, too, has extensive ties to both the SEIU and ACORN.

  CHAPTER 8

  Shadowboss Battle Plan

  SO what?” you ask. “What’s the difference? I’m not a union member; if the unions get some tax dollars, good for them. If they control some politicians, that’s their prerogative. I’m not paying dues.”

  Well, Virginia, get ready. Soon you, too, may be a member of a government employee union. You’re not a government employee? Don’t worry—the unions have a fix for that. The unions are reaching far and wide to organize the unorganizable, and to force people under union control who can’t be unionized under current law.

  We’ve seen again and again how government employee unions have been able to get political favors and special treatment from government that ordinary Americans aren’t able to win for themselves. But now, in their relentless quest to increase their membership and the amount of dues they collect, government employee union officials are doing the unthinkable—they’re targeting citizens who aren’t even government employees for forced unionization and calling in political favors to get it done.