Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (13 page)

The first bucket into which unions dump their cash is the political bucket, which is used to pay for the unions’ vast political organizing activities. The actual amount of union political spending cannot be accurately parsed from the limited union financial disclosure, as we mentioned before, but political spending is huge. Reported political spending is about 20 to 30 percent for government employee unions,
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but this certainly understates the true amount of union political spending.

Remember, unions have an interest in reporting as little political spending as possible because “labor organizations” can lose their special tax-free status, or can be required to pay taxes on certain types of political spending, if they show too much political activity. An example of how unions may treat spending as nonpolitical when it has some political aspect to it is seen in the National Education Association’s $80,000 payment in 2011 to Rock the Vote, an organization that works to engage young people in the political process and register them to vote, which the NEA identifies as an “advocacy organization.” While
the organization is officially nonpartisan, increasing the youth vote benefits Democrats—young people tend to vote Democrat and voted 2 to 1 for Obama over McCain in the last Presidential election. For financial disclosure purposes, though, the NEA treated this spending as completely nonpolitical; instead, they treated this spending as “union administration” for the purpose of “member/staff Education.”
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Of the money that unions disclose that they spend on political activity, much of the cash is so-called soft money spending. This includes a wide range of political organizing, including phone bank support, voter registration drives, mail and advertising, and turn-out-the-vote efforts. Soft money spending does not involve direct campaign contributions to candidates, which is called hard money support.

The
New York Times
recently noted that labor unions realize that “their ground troops, not money, is labor’s signal contribution.”
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What the
Times
means is that the unions spend far more on soft money political organizing activities that favor their candidates and the Democrat Party than on hard money campaign contributions through their political action committees (PACs). But who needs campaign contributions if the union will provide all the support—people, phone banks, mailings, and advertising—that campaign contributions would buy in the first place?

Unions also provide huge numbers of political “volunteers” for rallies, turn-out-the-vote efforts, and phone banks. But “volunteering” has a different meaning for unions than it does for most people. Republicans have a lot of independent grassroots volunteers—real people who give their time freely because of their love of country and of party. Democrats have some grassroots volunteers, too—but their real grassroots organizing work is performed by union members who can be paid to volunteer.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) does not allow volunteers for federal candidates, including Presidential candidates, to be paid by third parties for volunteering, and state laws vary on the point. But the unions get around these rules by compensating volunteers to do general political organizing work and get-out-the-vote efforts for the benefit of specific candidates. Although unions try to keep the fact that they pay their political volunteers a secret, unions offer expense reimbursement and stipends to members who act as political volunteers.
The going rate seems to be $25 for two hours on phone banks for get-out-the-vote messaging, and $50 for a three-hour solidarity walk, plus meals and T-shirts are also provided.
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Tea Party volunteers certainly don’t get those benefits—but then again, they don’t have a union representing them. Yet!

Another form of union political spending is “independent expenditures” or “outside spending,” which can be made by unions directly or through political organizations known as super PACs. Unions make independent expenditures directly, or through a super PAC, on advertising, mailings, or other media in favor (or against) specific candidates, but which are not coordinated with any candidate’s political campaign. After the Supreme Court ruled in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
in 2010, which allowed unions and corporations to make unlimited expenditures on political advertising and other political activities, unions ratcheted up their game. The decision allows unions to send their political troops out to canvass all households, union and nonunion, to increase support for their candidates and get their supporters to the polls. The
New York Times
notes that this change is “expected to increase labor’s political clout significantly in this year’s elections.”
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Labor unions can spend union dues on political advertising and other political activity directly or contribute to super PACs to do the spending for them. Most unions do both. Labor union super PACs accounted for 25 percent of all super PAC spending in the 2010 election cycle.
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Many unions have their own super PACs and also contribute to other liberal super PACs like those funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born magnate and huge donor to leftist causes.
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Andy Stern’s super PAC, founded in 2007 to help out President Obama and his buddies, was appropriately called Working for Us—the idea seems to be that the super PAC will elect politicians who will work for the unions and their agenda.
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But wait, there’s more in the political bucket! Dig deeper and you’ll find union cash flowing to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, and various state Democrat parties. The unions also hire outside lobbyists directly and pay for them out of the dues in this bucket. Finally, many states allow unions to make donations to state and local candidates from their dues income (subject to certain limitations), which would also come from this bucket.

When there’s a particularly hot-button union issue, unions also impose “special assessments” from their members, which gives the unions even more cash. Of course, they don’t really ask. They just require these extra assessments, which can be several hundred dollars in extra dues, on top of regular dues. A recent lawsuit involving an assessment by an SEIU local showed that these assessments can be pricey—workers had to pay an assessment equal to one-quarter their entire annual dues—on top of the dues that they paid already.
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Union members are mostly kept in the dark about union political spending. While unions are required by law to make reports to union members on how their dues are being used, many unions simply don’t comply. And even if union members
did
know, they couldn’t do much about it.
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Rank-and-file union members don’t get a say in whether a special assessment is levied on them or generally whether their dues are raised. And most union members have very limited rights to prevent their union from spending their dues on politics.
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About 60 percent of union members object to union political spending, but only union workers in a few states that have passed paycheck protection laws are consulted before their unions spend their dues income on politics.
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And in those forced-dues states in which most union members reside, it is not as if they can leave the union or stop paying union dues if they are dissatisfied.

Into the smaller second bucket, the unions put money for gifts, contributions, and donations to other organizations. And this bucket, too, is largely political. Union donations go to support left-leaning think tanks, political movements, and other organizations; the goal is to build alliances with like-minded political groups—the vast left-wing conspiracy, sometimes called the Shadow Democrat Party.

To see how this works, let’s look at America’s largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), which represents teachers. As part of its huge political spending, the NEA’s national headquarters alone made over $88 million in direct grants and donations to various organizations, almost all to left-leaning organizations and political organizing projects.
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The teachers unions are able to draw attention away from their huge political influence because Americans generally like and trust teachers. “Because they represent people working with children, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers benefit from residual good will in a way that the Teamsters and United Auto Workers do not,” one commentator noted.
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A typical NEA grant would be the $250,000 that the NEA gave to Arizona State University, which, like the NEA, is highly critical of charter schools.
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And just to ensure that NEA’s agenda makes its way in the media, NEA has given $100,000 to Media Matters, the George Soros–funded liberal “charitable organization” dedicated to targeting mythical right-wing media bias; $110,000 to the Center for American Progress, another Soros-funded radical-left think tank; and other grants to many more leftist organizations.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is among teachers unions’ favorite causes. The New York City teachers union provided logistical support for the protestors; the union president said, “Occupy Wall Street isn’t a place—it’s an idea, a movement that has brought national and international focus to the danger to our economy that we face because of growing income inequality.”
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Is income inequality an issue of direct importance to teachers? Of course not. But for future battles affecting the union more directly, the teachers union needs to be part of the grand leftist alliance that OWS represents.

While the teachers unions are almost 100 percent liberal in their public positions and support for other organizations, a solid 50 percent of NEA’s members consider themselves “more conservative than liberal,” according to NEA’s own polling.
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But that doesn’t stop NEA from continuing to pick its members’ pockets to support a hard-left agenda.

So what rights do union members have to control
donations
by their unions to liberal causes? Practically speaking, none. Union members aren’t given rights to vote against or opt out of political spending, although nonmembers paying agency fees do have the right to opt out of political spending. Until that changes, unions will continue to use philanthropy and resolutions to build a very strong coalition of leftist organizations that will support unions getting more power over our workers and our nation.

Almost forgot about it, didn’t you?

That’s because representing their workers isn’t as much of a core focus for government employee unions as political activity is. In this bucket, unions put funds for the actual cost of representing workers, negotiating contracts for them, handling grievances and, of course, organizing new groups of workers.
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You thought these causes were the central focus of the unions. So did union members. But representing workers is not really a big part of the unions’ business plan.

Because members and the public consider these to be core union activities, unions have an incentive to show as much possible spending on representational activities as possible. NEA shows about 13 percent of its national headquarters’ spending on representational activities, whereas the top ten unions show an average of 30 percent of spending in this bucket at their national headquarters level.
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The difference may be that other unions like SEIU may spend considerably more than the NEA on organizing new workers, which also goes into this bucket for financial reporting purposes but is really about business generation and improving the bottom line. It’s likely that unions actually spend far less than 20 percent on real worker representation, especially at the state and national level, since negotiation and grievances are mostly handled at the local union level.

How do we know that this bucket actually holds so little in practice? When members have sued to find out where their dues are going, unions have been able to show only that they spend about 20 percent of their dues income on these core union functions.
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An analysis of teachers union dues in Washington State found that 20 percent or less of dues income were used for “legitimate, chargeable union functions, such as collective bargaining, maintenance of the contract and grievances.”
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So politics is the name of the game for the government employee unions. Negotiation over worker contracts, in many cases is largely window dressing.
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Unions don’t generally make direct contributions to federal candidates, or most state and local candidates, out of their general revenues.
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If
unions reported actual political contributions from union dues, they’d face negative tax consequences. Instead, unions set up special political action committees (PACs) for the purpose of making campaign contributions to candidates. Union PACs cannot be funded from union dues, but are funded instead from contributions collected from the union’s members. (In contrast, super PACs can be funded with union dues, but cannot make campaign contributions to candidates and are used mostly for purchasing advertising and sending mailings in favor or against candidates.)

Member contributions to the union PACs are supposed to be voluntary and in addition to their union dues. In practice, however, unions frequently seem to extract these contributions from members without their consent. One recent FEC audit of a union showed that 93 percent of the time, the union was deducting PAC money from members without their written approval; in another case, the union was doing it 67 percent of the time.
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The moral of this story: don’t ever give your union the right to deduct amounts from your paycheck if you have the choice—of course, dues checkoff is mandatory for most union members.