Right to Work Blog

The Wall Street Journal asks its readers to take a pop quiz:

Who’s donated the most money to an effort in California to defeat Proposition 8, an initiative on the November 4 ballot that would define marriage as between a man and a woman in the state?

A) Gay-advocacy organizations

B) Civil-rights groups

C) The California Teachers Association

If you guessed “C,” you understand the nature of modern liberal politics. And if you didn’t, perhaps you’re wondering what exactly gay marriage has to do with K-12 public education. The high school dropout rate is 1-in-4 in California and 1-in-3 in the Los Angeles public school system, odds that worsen considerably among black and Hispanic children. So you might think the CTA, the state’s largest teachers’ union, would have other priorities.

Yet last week the union donated $1 million to the “No on Proposition 8″ campaign. Of the roughly $3 million raised by opponents of the measure so far, $1.25 million has come from the teachers’ union. “What does this cause have to do with education?” said Randy Peart, a public school teacher in San Juan who was contacted by a local television station. “Why not put that money into classrooms, into making a better place for these kids?”

In fact, the CTA and its parent organization, the National Education Association, have used tens of millions of dollars in mandatory teachers’ dues to advance all manner of left-wing political causes. And members like Ms. Peart are right to ask questions. In some years barely a third of the NEA’s budget has gone toward improving the lot of teachers themselves.

In addition to vigorously fighting school choice and other reforms that benefit underprivileged children but threaten the public education monopoly, the NEA has directly (or via state affiliates) bankrolled Acorn, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and, naturally, the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights.”

Public school teachers of America, take note. This is your dues money at work.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his power as governor to veto a proposed $6 million in state funding to a Big Labor institute that trains political operatives.

Kevin Korenthal, the Executive Director of the Associated Builders and Contractors of California, commented:

For the last 2 years, Governor Schwarzenegger has allowed the taxpayers to shoulder the cost for the operation of a special interest group training program that has long been used to train operatives on the finer points of defeating Republicans and conservative initiatives at the ballot box. The 6 million taxpayer dollars that the Miguel Contreras UC Labor Institute was handed each of the last 2 years is also responsible for the composition of a bogus “study” supporting a union Project Labor Agreement (PLA) for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency immediately before the agency’s commissioners voted on it. This was done with YOUR money - misusing the name and academic reputation of the University of California to advance the union political agenda.

So it was to our pleasant surprise to learn today that the long sought 2008/09 budget did not include this special interest payment. In this era of budget deficits and decreased tax revenues, Schwarzenegger’s line-item veto of this giveaway denies its beneficiaries much needed public funding. Yes, the unions will somehow come up with the money to keep the Big Labor training program in operation, but denying the program public money sends the right message and the Governor should be applauded for killing the funding.

Ivan Osorio asks the question most in the Mainstream Media will not — “What does Big Labor Want?” The answer is more power, more forced union members and, of course, more coerced union dues money. So how will they achieve their goals? As Mr. Osorio opines:

Every four years, pundits look forward to Labor Day as the launch of the “real” election season. This year, it’s especially appropriate, since organized labor is going all-out to influence not only the November outcome, but policy into the next president’s term. With the Democrats’ control of Congress likely to continue, and possibly expand, and the presidential contest a toss-up at this writing, it is worth asking: What does Big Labor want?

At the top of the unions’ policy agenda is the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would mandate an organizing method known as “card check” whenever a union requests it.

Facing a decades-old private-sector membership decline, unions have sought other organizing strategies, and card check has been among the most effective. Card check circumvents secret ballot elections by requiring only that a majority of employees sign union cards for a workplace to become unionized. Employees are often urged to sign cards publicly and in the presence of union organizers, which exposes them to high-pressure tactics which the secret ballot is designed to avoid.

Were federal law to establish card check as union’s chief organizing tactic, Big Labor would find it easier to corral new members who might be reluctant or unwilling, but would no longer enjoy the privacy of the voting booth.

So what would their dues money gain these thousands of new union members? An unfolding corruption scandal and a look at the state of union pension funds don’t paint a promising picture.

THIS MONTH, Tyrone Freeman, the head of California’s largest union local, was forced to resign amid mounting allegations of misuse of members’ union dues — including, reports the Los Angeles Times, “nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.”

The local union, based in Los Angeles, is affiliated with the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the most powerful unions in the United States and one of the most aggressive in organizing private sector workers.

The Times’ investigation relied in part on “the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings,” which, as a result of improved reporting requirements, are available online at UnionReports.gov. This site allows individual union members to see how union officials are spending their dues money — without having to ask the union officials themselves.

The AFL-CIO loudly opposed the Labor Department’s new reporting requirements, which in reality were a long-overdue overhaul to a dysfunctional system. Under the old reporting requirements (filed in form LM-2), unions could report literally millions of dollars in expenses under such meaningless descriptions as “sundry expenses.”

Expect a union-friendly Congress to help labor bosses return to the financial opacity they so fiercely defended — and which could allow the likes of Tyrone Freeman [to] carry on their spendthrift ways.

Finally, new union members should consider their retirement security. In recent years, many labor unions have sought to leverage their pension funds to push for policy goals at public companies’ shareholder meetings, which may have nothing to do with union members’ interests.

For example, the SEIU and UNITE-HERE, the textile and hospitality union, have joined with environmental activist groups to pressure corporate America to adopt policies to reduce their “carbon footprint” — their amount of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

JOINING WITH environmentalists is now an established union tactic. Labor unions increasingly rely on their allies to attack a targeted company’s record on “sweatshop” labor, environmental pollution, and other issues, thus obscuring the union’s self-interested motive in gaining economic concessions from the company.

Now, it appears that unions are leveraging their pension funds to push companies to adopt policies favored by green activists — even when they don’t benefit the unions’ own members, who bear the cost of such activism.

Today, most union pension plans are funded at levels much below those of pension plans provided by private employers, according to a recent Hudson Institute study.

“Union-negotiated pension schemes consistently maintain dangerously low ratios of assets to liabilities,” notes Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the study’s author and former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “Although nearly 90 percent of non-union funds had at least 80 percent of the funds they need, only 60 percent of union plans were at or above that mark.”

Compared to pension plans for rank-and-file employees, the pensions funds for union officers and staff were in much better shape — which undermines the argument that lower pension fund values could be explained by weaknesses in the economy or the stock market. “The success of the officers’ funds shows the heads of the national organization know how to properly fund a pension plan if they choose to,” explains Furchtgott-Roth.

But apparently many union officials choose to pursue activism in causes that don’t directly benefit their members, instead. Corralling in new members would allow this Ponzi scheme-like arrangement to continue, feeding money into underperforming pension funds.

So, to answer our original question, Big Labor wants more members and more dues money to spend on politics — and it wants Uncle Sam’s help in getting them.

When workers don’t have a choice whether or not to join a union and pay dues, union bosses take advantage of the situation. Case in point is California’s largest local union that has paid hundreds of thousands of workers’ dues money to firms owned by the wife and mother-in-law of the labor organization’s boss.

The Los Angeles Times discovered:

The Los Angeles-based union, which represents low-wage caregivers, also spent nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.

In addition, the union paid six figures to a video firm whose principals include a former union employee. And a now-defunct minor league basketball team coached by the president’s brother-in-law received $16,000 for what the union described as public relations, according to the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings and interviews.

Most of the 160,000 people represented by the union, a local chapter of the nation’s fastest-growing labor organization, the Service International Employees Union [sic], earn $9 an hour or slightly more tending to the infirm and disabled in private homes under taxpayer-funded programs. The workers, whose dues fill the local’s coffers, often are described as “the poor caring for the poor.” In its Labor Department filings, the local, headed by Tyrone Freeman, has reported more liabilities than assets for each of the last three years. . . . .

Based on documents filed with the Labor Department and Internal Revenue Service, the Guidestar nonprofit database, business records submitted to several state and local agencies and numerous interviews, a Times investigation has also found that:

* Payments to the company owned by Freeman’s wife were among the local’s largest single expenses last year. Payments by the charity, the Homecare Workers Training Center, to his mother-in-law’s firm represented more than 10% of the nonprofit’s total annual expenditures.

* A housing corporation that Freeman helped found as a nonprofit has not been granted the IRS tax-exempt status it sought and was suspended from doing business in California. It also has claimed on its website to have a “strong relationship” with the prominent California Community Foundation, which says it has no such relationship.

* The union spent at least $123,000 more on the fund-raising tournament at the Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad than it received in reimbursements, according to Labor Department filings and interviews. Freeman said the event made money for the charity. The union’s expenditures included $100,000 in payments to entities associated with former professional football star Eric Dickerson, which have been suspended from doing business in California. The payments were listed as donations to nonprofits, not as fund-raising expenses.

* The local’s nearly $10,000 tab at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar lounge known for its celebrity clientele and invitation-only memberships, was for “lodging,” according to the union’s annual financial report. A Grand Havana spokeswoman said the club does not provide accommodations. Freeman declined to characterize the expenditure, and after The Times inquired about it, he said he had refunded it.

As pointed out by Charlie Butts of OneNewsNow.com: “A considerable amount of funds raised toward defeating California’s Proposition 8 — which would define marriage as between one man and one woman — has come from two unions.” But despite the fact that California is not a Right to Work State, workers can do something about it.

In an interview with OneNewsNow.com, Stefan Gleason with the National Right to Work Foundation explains that:

“In this situation, many teachers may be very outraged to find out that their money is being diverted into this kind of a left-wing and controversial social cause,” he contends.

Gleason says union members need to learn their rights because unions are not letting them know. He explains that if members object on religious grounds, they need to submit a list of two or three organizations they can support, and they then agree with the union on a charity. “And the union may or may not agree to that. There may be some back-and-forth, but it has to be a mutually agreed upon charity,” Gleason adds. “It has to be one that does not conflict with the employee’s religious beliefs.”

The California Teacher’s Association is one of the unions supporting retaining homosexual marriage, which in May was legalized by the state supreme court.

Politicians beholden to Big Labor will stop at nothing to prevent workers from exercising their free choice as to whether to join a union. You can add Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to that list.

The mayor has decreed that any city project that receives funds from the Community Redevelopment Agency must agree to use union workers.

Rather than ensuring the best quality work at the lowest cost, this special-interest earmark to Big Labor prevents workers who chose not the join a union from getting work from a fund they subsidize with their taxes.

A federal judge has ordered California State Employees Association (CSEA) union officials to offer rebates to up to 28,000 state employees who are not union members. Imposing a “special assessment” in addition to mandatory dues, union officials seized an additional 25% of forced-union dues to wage their campaign against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s modest reform measures on the 2005 ballot.

The ruling stems from a class-action civil rights complaint, filed by nine state government employees (union members and nonmembers) with free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

In San Diego, California, Big Labor construction unions are demanding that Gaylord Entertainment, a hotel operator, sign a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) that prohibits non-union construction companies from working on the building of a new 1,500 room hotel.

Gaylord Entertainment is rightfully refusing.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Stephen Moore details the massive financial obligations and costs imposed on taxpayers by the public employee unions.

It didn’t get much attention on the East Coast, but in late February the town of Vallejo, California, came within an eyelash of becoming the first city since Bridgeport, Connecticut, back in 1991 to declare bankruptcy. This San Francisco Bay suburb of 120,000 residents was threatening to take this radical step because it can no longer afford to pay the extravagant salary and retirement benefits of its public employees. Just a few hours before the city council was to file for bankruptcy, the unions caved in and granted wage concessions to keep the city operational.

Vallejo is not alone.

There are several other cities in California that are contemplating the bankruptcy option thanks to multi-billion-dollar public employee pension and health care obligations that have become effectively unpayable. “Vallejo’s fiscal problems aren’t unique. They’re just the tip of the debt iceberg here in California,” says Keith Richman, a former state legislator and now president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (CFFR). The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has $26 billion of unfunded liabilities. The teachers’ retirement system is $20 billion in the red–health benefits add another $48 billion to its shortfall.

Moore called the situation with public employees’ unions the “. . . next great financial bubble in America–a fiscal time bomb that could cause your local and state tax bills to double or even triple in years to come.”

He is right. But this problem is not only on the state level.

Congress has decided to help make the fiscal time bomb even more explosive and powerful. The House of Representatives passed the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Act (H.R. 980) which would virtually ensure that Big Labor bosses are granted monopoly bargaining status for local and state police, firefighters, county paramedics, and other public safety officers in all 50 states. (This bill is officially called the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2007.)

If you think the problem of public employee unions’ stranglehold on taxpayer funds is bad, wait to see what happens if this bill becomes law.

In the book, Stranglehold, Reed Larson reveals the astonishing story of how organized labor has acquired incredible, hidden power over local, state, and national governments in America. For a free copy of Stranglehold, go here.

The venerable Dan Walters, who covers California state politics for the Sacramento Bee, has discovered the obvious in a column entitled “Unions again using politics to bolster membership.”

Walters notes:

It’s no secret that organized labor has seen a steep erosion of its involvement in the private economy and that it has shifted its emphasis to public employees in California and other states to maintain union membership.

There is, however, another wrinkle to labor’s struggle to survive as the economy continues to undergo vast structural change – exerting political influence to coalesce independent service workers into public or private employment, thus making unionization more likely.

When then California Gov. Grey Davis signed union legislation to convert workers who care for the aged and infirmed from private contractors to employees of county-level agencies, he created a road of unionization that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) continues to follow. Now, two similar drives are being mounted in California in new tests of unions’ ability to use political clout to expand membership.

One battle centers on the forced unionization of truckers at the seaports of Long Beach and Los Angeles:

The city governments of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which own the ports, have agreed to impose fees on containers and provide grants to the truckers to buy newer and cleaner rigs.

There is, however, a big hitch. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has close ties to unions, is insisting that the independent truckers become employees of large trucking firms, contending it’s needed to create financial stability for the truck replacement program. Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, a former utility executive, declares that proviso to be “unacceptable” political interference in private economic matters.

The thinly veiled conflict has to do with the unionization of the truckers. As independents, they cannot be organized as a union, but as employees, the Teamsters Union would quickly sign them up as members and gain a long-sought foothold into the region’s rapidly expanding port trade.

The other battle is with the SEIU, who are trying to nudge “. . . home child caregivers who receive public funds under the state welfare program into becoming employees of ‘provider organizations,’ which then could be unionized.”

Schwarzenegger has vetoed similar legislation in the past, citing its impact on a deficit-ridden state budget. Another SEIU-sponsored bill was placed on his desk this week by the state Senate. This time, he may be induced to sign it by his political debt to SEIU’s aggressive leader, Andy Stern, who provided the governor with some much-needed union support for his unsuccessful health care plan.

Given the fragmented nature of child care, it’s entirely possible under the legislation, Senate Bill 867, that a grandmother taking care of her daughter’s children would become a union worker, or at least be required to pay some kind of fee to the union as a condition of employment.

The cost of unionizing baby sitters has been tagged by legislative analyst at around $60 million a year, but given the state’s precarious financial situation, that would mean either taking funds from other services or reducing the overall availability of child care.

It’s often said “as goes California, so goes the nation.” Hopefully they can hold the line against these coercive unionization efforts in a state without a Right to Work law.