Union Member Seeks to Block Obama Labor Department’s Efforts to Roll Back Union Disclosure Rules

Department guts disclosure rule that has exposed numerous corrupt union boss schemes, let rank-and-file members know how dues are spent

Washington, DC (May 23, 2011) – With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a Maryland county government employee is asking a federal court to stop the Obama Administration from allowing union bosses to conceal lavish and corrupt union expenditures from workers.

Chris Mosquera, a member of a Municipal County Government Employee Local of the United Food and Commercial Worker (UFCW) union, filed the lawsuit against Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for rescinding a union boss disclosure rule which would make it less difficult for workers to hold union officials accountable.

Unions covered by the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) with total annual receipts of $250,000 or more are currently required to submit annual financial statements to the U.S. Department of Labor. LM-2 forms are the public disclosure documents for these larger unions and are available online on the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) website.

These forms have helped workers and citizen activists expose many unscrupulous union boss schemes, including lavish benefits to high-ranking union officials and loyalists, superfluous spending on union boss transportation (including private jets), and shady political spending (such as the Service Employees International Union bosses’ links to the disgraced political organization ACORN).

Read the entire release here.

Citizen Activist Wins Battle to Inform Keystone State Teachers of Their Constitutional Rights

Teacher union bosses aimed to keep Pennsylvania’s teachers in the dark

Harrisburg, PA (September 30, 2010) – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, citizen activist Simon Campbell has bested teacher union bosses in state court over his right to inform Pennsylvania’s nonmember teachers of their constitutional rights regarding union membership and dues payment.

Several years ago, Simon Campbell of Bucks County founded a group dedicated to the goal of making sure all public school children in the state have the legal right to a strike-free education after his own children were forced out of school in the wake of a debilitating union boss-instigated strike.

More recently, Campbell has requested that public school districts disclose the mailing addresses of teachers who have refrained from formal union membership with the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) union, but are still forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment because Pennsylvania does not have Right to Work protections for its workers.

Campbell wanted to advise the teachers about their rights under National Right to Work Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court precedent, such as their right not to subsidize union boss activities other than collective bargaining and contract administration and their right to challenge the union hierarchy’s calculations regarding the amount of forced dues charged to nonmember teachers.

Read the full press release here.

The National Right to Work Foundation has submitted formal comments opposing proposed rule changes that would dramatically undermine union transparency at the Obama Department of Labor (DoL). The full comments can be found here, but the long and short of it is that the Obama DoL is proposing two major changes to union disclosure under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959:

1) The first change would exempt "intermediate bodies" from LMRDA union disclosure requirements. "Intermediate bodies" are basically state and local subsidiaries of national unions, which means that Big Labor bosses could funnel forced-dues dollars to regional affiliates to avoid DoL transparency requirements if the proposed rule changes go through. Allowing union operatives to hide questionable expenditures through local and state subsidiaries clearly hampers the ability of workers to learn how their mandatory union dues are being spent.

2) The second change, which the Foundation also opposes, would no longer require Big Labor to file T-1 disclosure forms. These forms disclose financial information about Big Labor trusts - strike funds, political front groups, and other organizations unions control through board appointments, financial ccontributions, or contributions through a collective bargaining agreement. This means that Big Labor-funded organizations like American Rights at Work, a political front group that Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis served on before her appointment, would no longer be subject to basic disclosure guidelines.

Big Labor's influence at the Obama DoL has already been extensively documented, so we can't say we're surprised by this development. Although transparency is a poor substitute for freeing employees from the burden of compulsory unionism, if workers continue to be forced to pay union dues, Big Labor should at the very least have to explain where the money is going. That's why the Foundation opposes these rule changes, as well as any other attempt to undermine union transparency at the Obama DoL.