Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (29 page)

In settlement of the suit, the Teamsters agreed to court supervision over their union elections in order to purge the corrupt elements from the union. As part of the settlement, Teamsters had to hold rank-and-file secret-ballot elections of national union officials. Teamsters elections were designed to be much more democratic than most unions, which allow rank-and-file members to elect only delegates to a large representative assembly, which in turn elects the national bosses.

So everything would now be better, right?

Wrong.

This oversight of Teamsters elections would eventually make way for the election to Teamsters leadership of… James P. Hoffa Jr., Jimmy Hoffa’s son. In 1997, Hoffa ran against incumbent Teamsters leader Ron Carey, who was considered a reformer. Hoffa’s opponents claimed that if he won, Hoffa would reinstitute “the union’s bad old days, when mafia chieftains used teamster officials as puppets and the union’s treasury as their piggy bank.”
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So Carey’s backers created a “complex, interlocking fundraising scandal” to help keep Carey in power. The Teamsters even offered to give hundreds of thousands to the Democratic National Committee if the Committee found a friendly donor to give Carey’s campaign a $100,000 check. The Democratic National Committee didn’t get involved, but in the end the sides spent $3 million combined on the
race for the union presidency. Carey won by 52 percent to Hoffa’s 48 percent, only to see his victory overturned by the courts when this illegal funding scheme was uncovered.
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A court-appointed union monitor reviewed the election and found that Carey had funneled $700,000 of union funds to get himself reelected, a clear violation of union election rules. According to the union monitor, Carey had engaged in “significant electoral misconduct,” and the monitor denied him the chance to run again. The monitor explained, “To allow a candidate to run under the rules which he broadly and intentionally violated would do direct injury to the credibility of those rules. Allowing Mr. Carey to run, under these circumstances, simply would not provide a clean slate and a level playing field in the rerun election.”
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So what was the final result? Hoffa Jr. took over the Teamsters.

According to the
New York Times
, the report also had one other interesting finding: “several other labor leaders, including Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s [then] secretary-treasurer, and Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, had improperly raised money for Mr. Carey.”
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These leaders were not removed or charged, however. They remain at the heads of these unions to this day.

Fifteen years later, Hoffa remains in charge of the Teamsters. He vowed in 2011, “We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers… The one thing about working people is we like a good fight… President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” It almost sounds like he is promising Teamsters thuggery for Obama. And Hoffa backs Obama to the hilt for a good reason. During the 2008 election cycle, Obama was said to have privately promised the Teamsters that he would terminate the strict oversight of the Teamsters by the Labor Department.
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It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe Obama is waiting for a second term.

And what happened to Ron Carey? After being expelled from the union for life, Carey was indicted for perjury, and then found not guilty. He was writing a book on union problems—including double-dipping by union officials—when he died of lung cancer in 2008. At least, unlike Hoffa Sr. his death appears to have been of natural causes.

“But,” you say, “corruption exists within many organizations. What’s different about unions?”

Union election fraud has a long history. In 1964, an electrical workers union held an election for president. Soon, those counting the votes realized that the incumbent candidate was going to lose. Stealing votes at the two election sites was going to be difficult because the challenger had witnesses at both sites. So the vote counters allegedly came up with an ingenious solution: they opened three new branches on the spur of the moment, and didn’t let anybody in to watch them. Predictably, the incumbent president won. We know about this case because the scheme was uncovered, and when the U.S. Department of Labor examined the election closely, it found that that challenger had won by a large margin.
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Numerous cases have been uncovered of internal union elections being rigged. But are the cases we discover most instances of union election fraud, or just the tip of the iceberg?

In the late 1990s, New York City’s largest union of city workers was shown to engage in particularly egregious examples of voter fraud as well as corruption and embezzlement. Union officials were charged with falsifying a 1996 vote ratifying the workers’ five-year contract with the city. The officials stole the election by printing up thousands of blank ballots, marking each one with a yes vote and then mixing them in with the real ballots for counting.
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An investigation resulted in the conviction of at least twenty union officials for voter fraud, embezzlement and other crimes, and with the presidents of two local unions being convicted of embezzling over a million dollars for personal use.
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From sea to shining sea, cases have been discovered of union elections being rigged and stolen, keeping the membership from having a say in the direction of the union itself. In St. Louis, the police officers union set aside its election results after a secretary’s desk was allegedly found stuffed with blank ballots.
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The election, in which a challenger won over the incumbent by fifteen votes, was invalidated, and a new election held. The scrutiny this time ensured a cleaner process; the challenger won again and was installed as president.
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Another case of alleged union election fraud occurred at a local
union representing “academic student employees” at a public university in California. In a 2011 election, it looked like a group of reformers were about to win over the incumbent union officials. So the incumbent-friendly election committee reportedly simply cut short the vote count, disenfranchising half the voters. As the reform candidate for president lamented, “It’s hard to understand why else the current union administration would abandon the vote count without having counted nearly half the ballots cast in the election.”
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Eventually, voting resumed, and the challenger won—but only after the members brought pressure to bear.

Union members who don’t think they have been disenfranchised in union elections probably aren’t watching closely enough.
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Just visit the Department of Labor’s website to see new examples of internal union election fraud reported. In November 2011, the Transport Workers Union of America allowed three board members to be elected who weren’t even in good standing with the union; the same month, the National Emergency Medical Services Association was sued by the Department for failing to hold elections required by law; in October, the Department went after the International Union of Operating Engineers for rigging the election rules. The list goes on and on.

Some union officials may be willing to rig votes if necessary to get a contract approved or to stay in power. But they generally don’t have to—union members don’t vote in high numbers, and incumbents who control the union machine are better at getting their friends to vote than their challengers are. Participation rates in union elections are abysmal. For example, in 2007, only 22 percent of active union members voted in New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) election.
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But with 1,485 candidates running for 900 positions, whose name do you know on the ballot anyway? When Randi Weingarten was head of the UFT before moving up to become head of the American Federation of Teachers, she reportedly considered an election close when she received only 80 percent of the vote.
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One of the most common types of union corruption that is actually uncovered is embezzlement. There are seemingly endless cases of
union officials taking a little here and a little there, from the union cookie jar. Where extensive embezzlement is discovered, the national or international union usually takes over the local union, which is called trusteeship, in an attempt to rid the local union of corruption. Some have suggested that the parent unions sometimes expose corruption in local unions just to take over these unions and to put their own allies into leadership positions.

Former secretary of labor Elaine Chao reported that during the George W. Bush Administration, her Labor Department brought over 1,000 indictments for union-related fraud and achieved 929 convictions.
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Many of the fraud cases discovered involve embezzlement, usually a union official taking $100,000 or less from the union cookie jar, often to feed his gambling habit.
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In other cases, like a recent New York City case, the theft can be a whole lot more.

Melissa King administered employee benefits plans for the NYC “sandhog” union, the Laborers Union of North America. This local union represents subway diggers and others who work on underground construction projects. In 2010, King was charged with embezzling an almost unbelievable $42 million from the union.
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Although King pleaded guilty, she claimed that the amount she embezzled was exaggerated. But she did manage to use embezzled funds to spend an estimated $5.5 million on keeping fine horses for her daughter, over $7 million on her American Express bill, and other millions on jewelry and a Park Avenue residence before her theft was discovered.
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You know that there must be a lot of money available for the taking from unions if one person could embezzle tens of millions of dollars without detection for years.

Since 2001, the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards has prosecuted union bosses for over $100 million in embezzlement of union dues, but these federal cases represent only a fraction of all union embezzlement cases. The real take is probably much, much higher.

One reason unions aren’t better run is that in general, union members can’t leave one union for a better union. Remember the lyrics to
the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California”? You know—“You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave”? That’s the unions. Once unions organize a workplace, the workers are essentially trapped inside the union. “Unionization is not like joining a club or trying out a new Internet service provider, where you can easily quit or stop paying if you aren’t satisfied,” reports the Center for Union Facts.
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Union members are free to quit the union, but they can’t stop the union from representing them, and if they live in one of the twenty-two forced-dues states, they can’t stop paying fees to the union (which are the same or nearly the same as dues). If they try to stop paying the union, they will be fired.

A union can hold elections every year to unionize a workplace if they can show enough interest by the workers; but once the union is certified, the workers can only throw out the union with great difficulty. Actually kicking the union out of a workplace is called “decertification” of the union. If decertification happens at all, it usually occurs to replace one union with another. For example, a rival union may raid the membership of another union, and then try to get the workers to decertify the old union and replace it with the new union. You might be able to trade your union boss for another, but you generally can’t throw off the yoke of unionism once it’s forced upon you.

Legally speaking, the workers have a contract with their government employer, and the government employer itself has a “union security contract” with the union, which gives the union dues checkoff, the right to use workplace mails, and other valuable rights. But the workers themselves don’t contract directly with their union, and this severely limits their rights.

As a result, many union members have little or no control over union dues, despite being given some rights under the Landrum-Griffin Act, as we discussed earlier. The Department of Labor tells workers that “union members have a voice in setting rates of dues, fees, and assessments.” Members may have a voice, but they generally don’t have a vote. For many unions, dues are approved by vote of the convention of delegates elected by the members, but do not require approval of the members themselves.
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Additionally, the unions can set special
assessments, which is extra dues requirements, used for funding special political activities like voter initiatives—again generally by convention vote. So the union members have little direct control over their dues—and little recourse if they are dissatisfied with their union.

“Okay,” you say, “so what? I’m not a member of a union, and what they do in the privacy of their boardrooms is their business.”

There’s only one problem: it’s your business, too, when they fund political organizations that commit voter fraud to influence elections across the nation.

Government employee unions spend vast amounts of money on voter registration drives around the country. And in at least some cases, this money seems to have been spent on extensive fraudulent registration of voters.

In the U.S. Congress, a report issued by Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee explains that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) worked extremely closely with the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on voter registration, get-out-the-vote, and other election efforts. The report lists many examples of allegations that ACORN submitted falsified voter registration cards and engaged in various other fraudulent political activities.
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