A few industrious reporters for the Wall Street Journal have a blockbuster story today about how Big Labor has spent about four times more than previously thought on lobbying the government and trying to get union-friendly lawmakers elected.
Previously, union spending since 2005 was thought to be about $1.1 billion — a lot of money to influence policy by any standard. That was based on donations to candidates for office and related spending on their behalf that must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. Most reporters have relied on this source for their stories.
But the unions are also required to disclose their spending to the Labor Department. The Journal reporters obtained those reports and found that they are much more detailed. They also include spending on activities to persuade rank and file members how to vote, lawyers, commissioning polls, and funds to support protest activity, like the sit-ins at the Wisconsin state capitol last year.
Add all that together and those expenditures come to a whopping $3.3 billion (!) since 2005, bringing the total to $4.4 billion for the period. The National Education Association alone spent about $340 million over this period.
As Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard notes, this broader portrait is based new disclosure rules put in place by the Bush administration. Big labor has been pushing to have them removed ever since. Not hard to guess why.
For me, the most intriguing section of the Journal’s report was this:
Such activities are central to unions’ political power: The proportion of members who vote as the leadership prefers has ranged from 68% to 74% over the past decade at AFL-CIO-affiliated unions, according to statistics from the labor federation.
So, the number went from two-thirds to three-fourths? Why isn’t it closer to a 100%? Why is it so hard for for the unions to persuade even their own members? The answer may be that a lot of those members either aren’t happy with their leadership or don’t want to be union members in the first place but have no choice under “closed shop” rules. That is, the employer’s contract with the union forbids him from hiring anyone who doesn’t join up.
No wonder the unions are fighting right-to-work laws so fiercely.
