One of the least-heralded achievements of the Bush administration has been the gritty success of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. She has done something unique by actually enforcing the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, aka Landrum-Griffin. This landmark in federal labor-management law requires unions and management to disclose important information about the financial health of their institutions.
Management has long had to comply strictly with Landrum-Griffin, but until Chao came along, nobody bothered to enforce the law on unions except in a token manner. Beginning in 2001, Chao’s Labor Department developed and aggressively administered a series of new rules requiring the union bosses to cough up data and information about dues and spending they had kept under wraps for years.
In the process, information was uncovered that has led to hundreds of convictions of labor officials for a wide variety of fraudulent activities with union member dues. The Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) posts on the Internet all of the reports it receives at unionreports.gov. Curiously, Chao has received virtually no credit from those in the media and nonprofit communities who regularly applaud other efforts to shine light in dark corners.
Now, Chao’s Labor Department has made final a new rule requiring unions to disclose meaningful data about finances held in union trusts. Many unions maintain trusts to provide benefits to union members and their beneficiaries, as well as strike funds, redevelopment or investment funds, training funds, apprenticeship funds and educational funds.
Too often, according to the Labor Department’s Don Todd, rank-and-file union members have been unable to obtain “relevant and useful information they need to make fundamental investment, career and retirement decisions, evaluate options, and exercise legally guaranteed rights.” But, with the new rule, “the department hopes to deter potential misuse of union trusts that have occurred in the past and allow union members to know exactly where their hard-earned dollars are being spent.”
Unions and their Democratic allies in Congress and the mainstream media say their first priority is passage of the horribly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act that would do away with secret ballots in union representation elections. As a result, too little attention has been paid to what will likely happen to Chao’s rules if Democrats win the November trifecta of the White House and commanding majorities in the Senate and House. Congressional Democrats have already sought to cut the OLMS budget by half. And union leaders have made clear that they expect the next Congress and President Obama to finish the job by gutting OLMS completely and stopping the anti-corruption investigations. We will be watching this one closely.
