The Sacramento Bee has another story on the too cozy relationship between government and unions with a story about California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) pension investments. It seems that union donors got some awfully surprising deals while a union leader sat on the pension board.

At issue is the actions of Sean Harrigan, leader of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), who was a board member of the public employee’s pension fund. Apparently he solicited $300,000 in “donations” to the union’s campaign fund from companies that the pension fund invested in, investments he had a vote on arranging.

Naturally, Harrigan claims no quid pro quo was going on, but it is certainly a “coincidence” to see the same companies getting favorable investments from the pension plan suddenly “donating” large sums to the union campaign fund, isn’t it?

So we have a self-interested union chief soliciting “donations” to his union while administering a government employees pension fund. Too cozy, indeed.

Go on over to the SacBee and take a look at this story. It’s pretty interesting.

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