Right Voices

How can that be? Well, Ed has a good analysis of the situation, and the most ethical Congress has their hands all over it.

Ed:

The unions got their quid pro quo from Congressional Democrats in this session for the millions of dollars the unions spent on their election to power. The Democrats have cut back funding on a key oversight agency for unions, helping their partners to become more opaque in their political projects and to allow corruption to twist the collective bargaining for their members

But I thought oversight was one of the hallmarks of this Congress? Am I wrong?

Within the last several weeks, the AFL-CIO’s second-in-command sent letters to major accounting firms asking that independent auditors give a more thorough going-over of corporations’ financial disclosures and stock options grants. The unions are for disclosure, and they mean business (or would that be “anti-business”?).
Yet at the same time, union-funded politicians in Congress are successfully pushing forward in their campaign to slash the budget for the Department of Labor agency responsible for overseeing how union leaders spend their members’ money. Think of this organization ” the Office of Labor-Management Standards ” as the SEC for unions. …

More importantly, OLMS investigates abuse of dues money and monitors compliance with accounting requirements. It’s getting the job done. Since 2001 the courts have ordered restitution of $70 million in OLMS criminal cases. That’s real union money that union bosses are really trying to keep covered up.

Perhaps union officials and their allies in Congress are embarrassed about what the public finds in the union financial disclosures overseen by the agency.

Ed summarizes:

The OLMS points out far too many “inconvenient truths”, as one Democrat might put it. For instance, it reported that only 43 of 643 union audits showed financial compliance. That’s a whopping 6%, meaning 94% of all unions can’t pass a financial audit. It doesn’t seem very surprising, since millions of worker dollars end up at the Democratic Party. If a group of publicly-held corporations had a 6% failure rate for their financial audits, the Democrats and unions would scream bloody murder, let alone a 94% failure rate.

Why do Democrats want to reduce federal oversight while unions have a 94% failure rate on their audits? Wouldn’t that indicate a need for more oversight, and perhaps some investigations into potential fraud and other criminal conduct? If not, what kind of failure rate would Democrats need to see before enforcing the law and protecting the American worker? 95%? 96%? 100%? Or would that not be enough, either, to keep Democrats from giving their union partners a pass?

The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that we are talking about a laborers dues that are being squandered. How is this any different from the situation at Enron?

We keep hearing about how the Republicans are destroying the middle class. The Democrats are the protectors of the little guy, the organized laborer. How are they protecting the worker by turning a blind eye to theft? Let’s not pretend that the workers aren’t on to this either. How else can you explain the fact that the unions have been hemmoraging as of late.

Union membership dropped to 12 percent of U.S. workers last year, extending a steady decline from the 1950s when more than a third belonged to unions.

After membership had held steady at 12.5 percent in 2005, it declined anew last year, a decrease of more than 325,000 workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday.

Membership had been 20.1 percent in 1983, when the bureau first provided comparable numbers. About 35 percent of American workers were union members in the mid-1950s.

The latest gloomy news for organized labor comes at a time when the group is pushing legislation in the Democratic-controlled Congress that would make it easier for unions to organize.

Oh, now I get it, as this January 2007, ABC News article points out, it was the plan of the unions to have the Democrats circumvent the law for them…Silly me, and to think that I thought Pelosi was serious! Just stop the oversite and report false positives..got it!