The Trump administration last week announced new rules increasing and improving union transparency. This is the right move, and it is something union members broadly support.
Unionized workers put millions of dollars each year into the organizations that represent them in the workplace. In many states, they are forced to contribute to unions from their paychecks as a condition of employment even if they choose not to join a union. In most union shops, none of the current workers have any say in establishing their union as the monopolistic entity bargaining on their behalf.
This is why all workers deserve absolute transparency as to how their membership contributions are spent. Union bosses tend to resist such transparency kicking and screaming. Unfortunately, they can often find Democratic politicians willing to support their cause. This is not how it was when the Department of Labor was first created. From its inception, the department made sure that unions would be accountable to their members and fee-payers.
Although union corruption is nothing new, the last few years have seen a number of high-profile lapses in accountability that cry out for greater oversight. Most recently, this includes the criminal convictions of eight former United Auto Workers bosses of embezzling union trust funds. It also includes last week’s separate and unrelated indictment of former UAW President Gary Jones for embezzling more than $1 million in union funds.
In order to prevent such criminality and guarantee transparency, the Trump administration has announced new rules for union financial disclosure that would have prevented most of these abuses had they been in place sooner.
The new rules will force annual disclosure of funds in trusts in which unions have a stake, in addition to other union funds and officials’ expenses. Until now, union bosses have been able to hide funds from federal scrutiny by putting them into trusts over which their unions do not have complete control.
These rules are not only fair and just but also necessary. Unfortunately, for decades, Democrats have taken the side of anti-transparency union bosses. For the longest time, they resisted full disclosure of the benefits paid to union officers and employees, as well as the names of those buying assets from or selling them to a union. Such a lack of transparency positively invites abuses.
According to the latest data, the rate of union membership in the United States declined last year to 10.3%. One reason for this is the changing nature of modern employment — another is the fact that workers are fed up with putting inordinate faith in corrupt leaders who resist and avoid transparency.
Like corporate and government transparency, union transparency should be a bipartisan issue. As long as workers are made to hand over their hard-earned cash in exchange for union representation, there is no reason the public should not have a full accounting for every single dime handled by every single labor union.
