Union bosses are picking the pockets of working stiffs
Posted on March 16, 2008 at 1:30 pm by WTH
Here is a great read in The Reader’s Digest
Brotherhood of Thieves
Union bosses are picking the pockets of working stiffs.
By Michael Crowley
Pat Tornillo used to enjoy the high life. He was a world traveler who flew off to exotic destinations like India, Bangkok and Australia. On one occasion, he reportedly slept in a $2,000-per-night hotel suite. On another, he used his business credit card to charge almost $4,000 at a single jewelry store.
Tornillo had it made all right — until he was caught with his hand deep in the till. You might guess he was an executive at Enron, or maybe Tyco or WorldCom. Nope. Tornillo was head of the Miami-based United Teachers of Dade, using the dues of union members to subsidize his lavish lifestyle. Even as he railed against low teacher salaries, Tornillo was blowing money on custom-tailored suits, spa visits — even purchases from the Sinclair Intimacy Institute, which peddles “better sex” videos.
But why point the finger at Tornillo alone? An even bigger thief is Barbara Bullock, the former president of the Washington, D.C., teachers union. From 1995 to 2002, she and her accomplices swiped an estimated $2.5 million from her 5,000-member union. FBI investigators seized thousands of dollars’ worth of goods from her, including furs, designer handbags and Ferragamo shoes. The annual dues of hardworking teachers — nearly $650 in 2002 — helped pay for her splurges.
Why even stop at Bullock? There’s so much corruption today among union bosses that it feels like we’re back in the era of Jimmy Hoffa. “There is always something happening somewhere in the country where a union official is treating union dues like his own personal piggy bank,” says David Kendrick, a union watchdog at the National Legal and Policy Center in Falls Church, Virginia. He tracks these abuses in a biweekly newsletter, “and we always have enough stories to put out another issue.”
In the first three months of 2004, the Labor Department reported criminal enforcement actions — indictments, guilty pleas or sentencings — against 34 union officials or employees. In 2003, the total figure was 143. Stan Greer, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee, says that in the past four years, the presidents or former presidents of three national unions have been convicted of felonies.
Here’s a bigger outrage: We could stop a lot of this corruption if the Labor Department showed more muscle. Though the government requires unions to submit financial reports, fully a third are filed late or not at all — and the unions are rarely audited.
Workers who ask for details about their union’s finances often get nowhere. “Many people come to us and say their union told them to buzz off,” says David Kendrick. “There’s a climate where union officials aren’t accountable to anyone.”
No wonder, then, that corruption runs rampant. Take the leadership of the 125,000-member international ironworkers union. Last year the union’s former president, Jake West, was imprisoned for stealing union funds. According to prosecutors, West and other union officials embezzled over $400,000 — and spent it on vacations and country club memberships. They also ate well on the union’s tab: nearly $500,000 over six years at one Washington, D.C., steakhouse.
Then there are the four steelworkers officials in Virginia who pleaded guilty to pilfering some $10,000 from a relief fund that was established for workers following a foundry explosion.
In Ohio, a machinists union treasurer admitted embezzling $36,000 in union funds. A brazen bookkeeper in New Mexico stole $57,000 from a builders union, at the same time that she filched $11,600 in dues from her second job at a local ironworkers union. Then she forged checks to cover her tracks.
Of course, this is only the illegal side of robbery. Union bosses are effectively picking pockets by taking salaries that dwarf the earnings of the working stiffs who support them. For instance, a Chicago Teamsters leader who retired a few months ago earned $586,000 last year. Salaries like his may explain why the rank and file across the country often pay $500 or more in annual dues.
Other union leaders with fat paychecks include John Bowers, president of the longshoremen, who made $421,000 last year, plus another $172,000 as head of the union’s Atlantic Coast district; Douglas McCarron, president of the national carpenters union, who pulled in $336,000; and Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, who got a salary of $412,000, along with a $130,000 “allowance.”
It will take rare courage to bring down salaries like these. Pay is often voted on at public meetings where a dissenter risks a lot by openly defying the big guys.
There’s more chance of netting the out-and-out criminals if the Labor Department follows through on its pledge to tighten financial accounting and oversight. Just demanding an annual audit may deter some of the embezzlement, bloated salaries and perks.
Here’s the ultimate deterrent, though. Last year, Pat Tornillo was sentenced to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay $800,000 to the United Teachers of Dade. And Barbara Bullock, the former teachers union president in Washington, D.C., is serving a nine-year sentence at a prison in Alderson, West Virginia. America’s union workers will only get justice when all the corrupt union bosses get theirs.
