Union Corruption Sparked Disclosure Laws
Posted on January 21, 2008 at 4:28 pm by WTH
Friend of the Union Label Blog, David Denholm, posted a short history on how union corruption caused Congress to institute disclosure laws, and also how they have been all too often thwarted.
Corruption Sparked Disclosure Law
In 1959, after extensive hearings into labor union corruption, Congress enacted the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act. Among other things, the act required labor unions to file annual financial reports with the U.S. Department of Labor.
The original union financial disclosure forms required by LMRDA, LM-2, provided little information of real value and for all practical purposes were inaccessible to most union members.
While the original purpose of union financial disclosure under LMRDA was to allow union members to monitor their union’s finances, in the case of government employee unions there is a broader need. Government employee unions, particularly at the local government level, have a significant impact on the political process.
In recent years the Office of Labor-Management Standards, the office in the U.S. Department of Labor responsible for enforcing LMRDA, has made significant improvements in the content of the reports and in making them available on the Internet. Organized labor has resisted these needed reforms.
In 1974, after the Watergate scandal, again in an effort to prevent corruption, Congress enacted the Federal Elections Campaign Act, requiring candidates for federal office to file financial reports.
I’d like to add one thing here. These are the sorts of transparency in financial dealings that the unions are against for the simple reason that it makes it all too easy for people interested in holding union thugs accountable for their actions to see the union’s perfidy. The unions want these records secret and they claim that it is somehow an invasion of privacy to have these records open for all to see. But, let’s contrast that attitude with their newfound desires to institute card check laws so that their own members (and members to be) will no long have the same right to any privacy when they vote on whether a union should be brought into the work place or not!
With a contrasting of these two issues, we once again see that unions have no interest in “helping the little guy” and are far more interested in furthering their own power, self aggrandizement, and their own self enrichment.
Thanks David for a great post.
