To readers who followed Big Labor’s record-breaking political contributions last election, it should come as no surprise that the AFL-CIO and the SEIU officials are hinting at big union debts. Of course, so long as the union bossses have a basically unrestricted right to to collect (and jack up) forced union dues, they will not have trouble raising revenue until most American jobs are destroyed.
But don’t be surprised to see the union bosses lining up at the federal bailout trough (again) to exploit the situation. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:
Alarm is coming even from inside the AFL-CIO — specifically, from Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who sits on the AFL-CIO’s finance committee. Bloomberg News reports that he is circulating a report claiming the AFL-CIO engaged in "creative accounting" to conceal financial difficulties heading into last year’s Presidential election. As recently as 2000, the union consortium of 8.5 million members had a $45 million surplus. By June of last year it had $90.6 million in liabilities, or $2.3 million more than its $88.3 million in assets. "If we are not careful, insolvency may be right around the corner," Mr. Buffenbarger warned.
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As for the SEIU, as recently as 2002 total SEIU liabilities were about $8 million. According to its 2008 disclosure form, the union owed more than $156 million, a 30% increase over the $120 million it owed in 2007. Its liabilities now equal more than 80% of its $189 million in assets. Net assets fell by nearly half last year, to $34 million, from $64 million in 2007. The debt includes an $80 million loan the SEIU took out in 2003 to purchase a new headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. But the liabilities also stem from political spending, including at least $67 million last year on political and lobbying expenses, twice what it spent in 2007.
Adding insult to injury, the SEIU is initiating another vicious "corporate campaign" to intimidate one of its biggest creditors:
By the end of 2008, the SEIU also owed Bank of America nearly $88 million, including its headquarters loan and another $10 million for unspecified purposes. This is the same BofA that the union as spent the past months attacking as the face of Wall Street excess. The SEIU has protested outside of Bank of America offices and demanded the resignation of CEO Ken Lewis.
Keep in mind that any union debt is paid off by rank-and-file workers across the country, many of whom are unwilling contributors to Big Labor’s massive political apparatus. No wonder unions are having more and more trouble convincing workers to join, which is why they’re going all-out to get Congress to pass "card check" instant-organizing legislation:
One irony here is that the SEIU’s Mr. Stern, the most powerful labor leader in America, loudly broke from the AFL-CIO in 2005 because he said it spent too much in Washington and not enough on organizing. But unions can’t resist the lure of the Beltway precisely because they fare so poorly in the private marketplace. The union red ink helps explain why Mr. Stern and AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney are lobbying so hard for Congress to rig the rules to make it easier for unions to gather more dues-paying members.
The Journal also notes that union bosses are working overtime to rollback basic transparency guidelines, something the Foundation sounded the alarm on back in March:
Unions have a long history of corruption in part because they mix large amounts of cash from dues with political purposes and little oversight. Yet the same union leaders who denounce failures of corporate governance bitterly resisted the Bush Administration’s expanded disclosure, and now they want the Obama Administration to water down those rules. The news about rising union debt shows why that transparency is more necessary than ever.
Keeping basic transparency regulations in place would be marginally beneficial, but the reality is that union bosses will continue to extort money from unwilling workers for a variety of activities as long as they enjoy exclusive monopoly bargaining and forced dues privileges. Making union membership and dues-payment strictly voluntary is the only effective way to combat union corruption and encourage financial restraint, which is why state Right to Work laws are so important.
