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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
Gregory Hall had an interesting piece in the Washington Examiner centered on the corruption of ACORN, the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now. Hall is a former member of ACORN and even he says that the organization is so corrupt that it should not be allowed to perform the Census operations that the Obama administration is entrusting to it. Sadly, such corruption is the Chicago Way with which Barack Obama is so well acquainted.
Former organizer says ACORN will commit fraud in Census work
Following calls by a reform group known as the “ACORN 8,” many are rightly worried about the prospect of taxpayer money flowing to the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for the stated purpose of counting Americans in the 2010 U.S. census.
After all, this is the same group that couldn’t count to “1″ when registering voters during last year’s election. In Ohio, ACORN’s machine registered one man more than 70 separate times. But the group’s critics don’t face the same mathematical challenges. They have counted to at least 14 – the number of states investigating ACORN for voter registration and potential voter fraud. In the past month alone, the group has been named in complaints by at least two states.
While much criticism is directed at ACORN, though, the problem is more complex. A group intended to better our communities is a thing that should be commended. Unfortunately, a small cadre of powerful but corrupt ACORN executives have warped the organization’s mission into a high-powered, big-money machine that treats its well-intentioned, idealistic staff horribly.
Consider ACORN’s record for its staff: The group has sought minimum wage increases (yay!) but sued to get out of paying its own staff the minimum wage (boo!). ACORN campaigns for seven sick days a year but only gives its staff five.
ACORN short-changed employees, while the founder’s brother embezzled nearly a half-million dollars. ACORN has founded unions but busts unions when its own employees try to organize. And every time the organization’s machine creates voter fraud allegations, the group throws its poorly trained temporary workers under the bus.
Just since starting our “Speaking Truth To Power” campaign to achieve justice for ACORN workers within the last year, I’ve heard firsthand stories of temporary workers – like those who will be hired for the Census project – not getting paid the agreed wage (and some not getting paid at all), being dropped off in locations for 10-14 hours a day with no one answering calls to relieve them or save them from heat exhaustion. Some even say they were misled about why they were gathering signatures.
The plight of ACORN’s full-time staff is hardly better. Most complain of the group’s “crony” management system. And many say they’ve been coerced into lying to ACORN’s low- and moderate-income membership about how their “dues” will be spent.
Meanwhile, most people unfamiliar with ACORN don’t understand how the headline-grabbing fraud keeps happening. Perhaps the least-understood problem is the unofficial “quota” system that ACORN uses for its political canvassers. By encouraging (or, for all intents and purposes, requiring) its foot soldiers to reach a numerical goal for each day, it provides an incentive for corruption during tough times.
In all, the corrupt management of ACORN allegedly forced its part- and full-time employees to stretch or break laws just to meet registration quotas to keep their jobs. That’s because ACORN gets paid by its sponsors and pressures employees to deliver unreasonable goals.
There is no reason to believe the problems of staff mistreatment or systematic fraud will be any different if and when the federal government asks ACORN to take its show on the road to households across the country.
That’s one reason why former ACORN board member Marcel Reid has publicly called for the government to withhold future taxpayer money to the group until a full investigation can be held into the corrupt executive leadership that has led this promising community organization astray.
A note to future ACORN census workers: We are here for you when ACORN management betrays you. To everyone else we say, grab your government by the lapels and demand they help clean up ACORN before sending tens of millions of dollars to an organization that mistreats taxpayers and its own employees alike.
We all want stronger communities. Some of us want a stronger progressive movement. Neither will happen until we clean up ACORN and protect taxpayer money.
A federal judge in Manhattan sentenced former President of the New York City Central Labor Council (CLC), Brian M. McLaughlin (who was also part of the AFL-CIO), to 10 years in prison for fraud, embezzlement and corruption charges this week.
The 57-year-old McLaughlin was also a low-level New York City Assemblyman from Queens whose power came from his close ties to the labor union. He “pleaded guilty in March 2008 to racketeering charges that included using embezzlement, fraud and bribes to take money from taxpayers, labor unions and contractors, even from a Little League team in Queens,” reported The New York Times.
Prosecutors charged that Mr. McLaughlin had misappropriated more than $330,000 from his own re-election committee; $185,000 from the New York City Central Labor Council, which he led; and more than $35,000 from the State Assembly. They said he had created fictitious jobs within the labor council and on his own legislative staff, and took kickbacks from the jobholders.
McLaughlin is a perfect example of what is wrong with an intimate connection between unions and government. Not only was he a seven-term Assemblyman, but he remained a union chief which left him able to game the system in both directions for personal gain.
It should be obvious to anyone that no politician should be permitted to remain a part of a union while supposedly serving as an elected official at the same time.
McLaughlin also assisted the courts to try and convict others involved in his criminal enterprise and had hoped to find a more lenient sentence from the effort. Fortunately he was disappointed.
CNSNews is reporting that Congress is at loggerheads on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). It looks like no vote is coming on this any time soon. We need to keep it this way at the very least. More preferably we need to kill this jobs killing bill.
Despite Obama’s Plea, No Compromise on Card-Check Legislation Likely
The controversial card-check bill, a sought-after boon to labor unions, is stuck in Congress, and although President Obama is pushing for a compromise, both sides seem dead-set against one.
In an appearance last Thursday in Rio Rancho, N.M., Obama admitted that card check — the so-called Employee Free Choice Act – is stalled, and he talked about the possibility of a compromise…
Read the rest at CNSNews.com.
What, there aren’t any websites run by American workers and hosted in the USA that the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department could find to host its press releases? Apparently not as far as the union is concerned, anyway, because a press release to push a Washington conference in support of the Employee Free Trade Act (EFCA) is hosted on PR-USA.net, a misleadingly named site hosted and run in Varna, Bulgaria and registered by one Mr. Dobri Bojilov .
Another amusing aspect of this choice for a site host is the fact that the conference is discussing the issue of H2(b) visa reform. Of course, the H2(b) visa is the the work visa offered to foreign workers by the U.S. government. So, this union is using a foreign website to advocate against the importation of foreign workers. This union is using a foreign run site to advocate for American workers.
Why is the AFL-CIO using a foreign web service to host its press releases? Don’t they care about American workers?
I wonder if the AFL-CIO can spell hypocrisy?
Patrick McIheran has a short piece on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s website that is a pretty good read. I think you should all check it out in its entirety here.
The piece has several links to other articles in it, but the main point is about the overgenerous and unfunded pension plans that unions all across the country have been foolishly allowed to negotiate. These pensions are simply untenable and always were but most businesses and unions kept kicking this can down the road until it is finally hit a dead end.
McIheran quotes Diana Furchgott-Roth as she discusses how these pension obligations will pretty much destroy any new business that ends up forced into a union via the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
“If the arbitration panel were to require a firm to join one of the many underfunded plans, the firm could well become liable for the pensions of workers, some already retired, of other firms. This would generate an inflow of new cash to the plan but harm the financial position of the firm. According to Brett McMahon, vice president of the construction company Miller and Long, ‘Strengthening underfunded plans is an unstated union motive for seeking mandatory arbitration.’”
The EFCA really needs to be shot down or this depression in which we are in will get far, far worse.
So, go on over to the Journal Sentinal and read it all.
Here is an interesting summary of some ACORN/SEIU/White House connections from Todd Glick’s FaceBook page.
SEIU, ACORN, and the White House
Glenn Beck has really gotten his teeth into the corruption at ACORN and its connection to SEIU. He admits that he believes the connection is very complicated and designed to be so. He is correct. ACORN has 330 tentacles with two of them reaching in to Andy Stern’s SEIU. Why? Because SEIU locals 100 and 880 are run out of the same address on 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans.
It is important to understand how the money flows from SEIU Locals 100 and 880 to ACORN. Employment Policies Institute has highlighted the money flow in its piece, Rotten Acorn. I am going to let the EPI discuss it in their own words.
SEIU Member Money Feeding ACORN Coffers
As with most ventures ACORN is involved in, it would take a forensic accounting expert to track all of the money flowing from one ACORN group to another. But the financial disclosure forms from ACORN’s unions shed some light on their cash flow.
Local 880’s Department of Labor financial filings from 2005 show a pattern of loans and payments to ACORN-run organizations:
- A loan receivable from SEIU Local 100, which started the year at $11,500 and ended the year at only $500—a note shows the loan wasn’t repaid in cash, but rather “reduced to in-kind service”
- “Gifts” totaling $151,694 to the L880 Political Action Committee, which is run out of ACORN’s Louisiana office
- Local 880 received $36,425 as a “contractual fee” from the L880 Political Action Committee
- Representational activities included $6,388 in non-itemized payments to the Chief Organizer Fund (Chief Organizer is Rathke’s title for most of his positions) at ACORN’s office and $66,870 in non-itemized payments to Citizens Consulting Inc., ACORN’s multi-use organization
- $177,430 paid to Citizens Consulting for “Accounting and Administrative Support” and non-itemized transactions for “General Overhead”
- $10,102 paid to Citizens Consulting for “Union Administration”
Local 100’s filings show:
- $8,098 in overhead paid to Citizens Consulting
- $9,523 paid to the “Peoples Equipment Resource Corp,” which is registered to Rathke at ACORN’s headquarters
- $6,300 to the Elysian Fields Corporation
- Accounts payable records show $73,984 to the Elysian Fields Corporation; $34,241 to Citizens Consulting; $13,795 to the Fifteenth Street Corporation; and $9,072to the 4415 San Jacinto Corporation—all of which are run out of ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters
- Loans payable included its original $11,500 debt to Local 880 and $8,907 to the Association for the Rights of Citizens—a group run by Local 880 and ACORN.48 Loans to these two organizations were reflected as early as 2000, with as much as $47,000 of money from members in Local 880 being used to support its less-successful sibling.
Here is more information on the partnership between ACORN and SEIU.
Hiring ACORN to attack Wal-Mart isn’t cheap. Financial disclosures show that the SEIU headquarters paid $500,000 in two installments to the “Wal- Mart Organizing Project.” The checks were sent to ACORN’s headquarters in Louisiana.
As part of a labor disagreement in Illinois, ACORN and SEIU have launched a campaign to attack the reputations and apply logistical pressure to Advocate and Resurrection hospital chains. They’ve gone beyond what affected doctors consider responsible, and have brought people “by the vanload” to the hospitals’ emergency rooms in a bid to harass the healthcare providers.
And The Other McCain has this from Kevin Mooney at The Washington Examiner:
While the organization’s complicated structure makes is difficult to determine how many affiliates and subsidiaries are tied in with ACORN’s vast apparatus, its connection with organized labor, especially the Service Employees International Union, is well-established, Vadum observed. SEIU Locals 100 and 880 are identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site. U.S. Department of Labor LM-2’s (financial disclosure forms) point to over $600,000 in transactions between these same SEIU locals and other ACORN operations. A 2007 LM-2 form shows SEIU Local 880, which is active in Illinois and Minnesota, donated $60,118 to ACORN for “membership services.” Organized labor has kicked it back in the form of gifts and grants to ACORN totaling $2.4 million, the LM-2’s reveal.
It gets worse. California is on the brink of bankruptcy requiring them to cut prevailing wages. What is SEIU doing to California? They are attempting to block stimulus money for California by exerting pressure on the Obama administration.
ABC News Follows Up On SEIU Role In CA And Obama Admininistration
We’ve been covering the SEIU’s troubling role in lobbying Obama administration to withhold $6.8 billion in stimulus funding to California. As part of the state’s budget deal, Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature agreed to cut pay for home health workers (who are SEIU members) by two dollars an hour, totaling $74 million.
The SEIU, enraged by this move, protested to the Obama administration. Much to the concern of California officials, the Obama administration officials actually invited the SEIU to participate in a conference call between federal and state government officials.
ABC News followed up on this incident with their own report, which featured a noteworthy observation by a spokeswoman for the California Department of Health and Human Services: “This is an unusual situation. It is incredibly unusual in our experience to have stakeholders on a call like this.”
A SEIU spokeswoman offers an audacious defense of the call, claiming that “when it came time for a call, all the parties involved were included. This is an example of transparency.” It’s doubtful that the SEIU would say the same thing if a corporation with their contract at stake was invited to participate on a conference call with government officials.
This episode makes clear that the SEIU – and labor in general – can and will exert influence with the Obama administration.
Why is all this important? Because Obama appointed Craig Becker, the associate general counsel at Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Becker is a radical on unions. His opinion are well known.
Mr. Becker has other ideas. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, he explained that traditional notions of democracy should not apply in union elections. He wrote that employers should be barred from attending NLRB hearings about elections, and from challenging election results even amid evidence of union misconduct. He believes elections should be removed from work sites and held on “neutral grounds,” or via mail ballots. Employers should also be barred from “placing observers at the polls to challenge ballots.”
More extraordinary, Mr. Becker advocated a new “body of campaign rules” that would severely limit the ability of employers to argue against unionization. He argued that any meeting a company holds that involves a “captive audience” ought to be grounds for overturning an election. If a company wants to distribute leaflets that oppose the union, for example, Mr. Becker said it must allow union access to its private property to do the same.
This is pretty strong evidence that ACORN’s and SEIU’s influence reaches not just to the White House but all the way into the Oval Office.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston