The Left is caught taking it's orders from the Thugs running the Unions. Shades of "Atlas Shrugged!"
Pro-labor reps spurn Bush rules
By Melissa Seckora - The Hill
A bipartisan House coalition appears to be primed to force the Labor Department to scrap proposed departmental regulations that would require greater reporting and financial disclosure for unions.
The pro-labor coalition, made up of Democrats and like-minded Republicans, could help kill the rule changes when the House takes up the appropriations bill for the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education departments later this week.
"We're fully expecting at least one Democrat or Republican to offer an amendment to the appropriations bill that says no money can go to implement the LM2 rule," said one Republican leadership aide.
"By opposing this simple change, members would be positioning themselves as having a double standard, they believe corporate bosses should be accountable for their actions but union bosses should not," another House GOP aide said.
"This is a very tricky issue for the Democrats that may not be as easy for them to manage as they think," he added.
The changes in this labor-management rule would require labor unions to more fully disclose and itemize their outlays.
Documents released by the Labor Department under the Freedom of Information Act reveal serious problems with the financial management of 44 labor organizations affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
Although the documents support Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's call for changes to the 1959 Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act, department officials said they were not specifically released to bolster its position in the upcoming House battle.
"The information wasn't put out publicly even though it supports the case for union transparency because our goal is not to embarrass anyone but to have a constructive conversation and fix the problem," a department official said.
Chao cited the internal documents Feb. 26 in a closed-door session with the AFL-CIO Executive Council. They delineate the problems posed by the 44 affiliated unions, all of which were represented at the session. For each of the affiliates, the list shows the number of indictments, convictions, exclusions from holding office, amount of restitutions and jail time served.
The table covers a five-year period from 1997 to 2002.
Of the 44, the Electrical Workers, with 77 convictions, the Steelworkers, with 57, and the United Auto Workers, with 35, compiled the worst records.
Chao's pledge at the meeting to impose the new disclosure requirements enraged council members, many of whom left describing Chao?s attitude as combative.
"We see this really as an attack on workers and their unions," said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Lane Windham, adding: "When concerns about the cumbersome regulations were raised, she lashed back and pointed out incidents of corruption. These were cases the unions caught and corrected. We thought she was behaving in a belligerent fashion."
Chao told reporters in May that she thought she gave a "very nice speech" at the time and that her approach was "very conciliatory and friendly." She also said she was floored by stories that suggested otherwise.
The newly released materials document how the current LM2 rules fail to require unions to explicitly reveal their spending practices and allow them to evade proper reporting procedures. Many of the case studies show financial disclosures in millions of dollars with only vague descriptions and classifications of"expense reimbursements" or "professional fees."
A "Mr. Harnage" with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), for example, signed a 2000 LM2 report noting disbursements of $550,734 for "professional fees" and $695,157 in unitemized disbursements as "travel." In the past five years, the AFGE had 35 indictments and 29 convictions.
"When you make some change proposal, immediately people will line up and oppose it," said Victoria Lipnic, assistant secretary of the Employment Standards Administration. She noted that in the period under review, departmental investigative efforts resulted in approximately 11 convictions a month, separate from those itemized in the FOIA documents.
"The goals of the statute are to ensure financial accountability and transparency for union members. In this case, we?ve had a disclosure regime in place for 40 years, and in trying to change that you see a pushback from the regulated entity when regulators attempt to make a change," she said.
Supporters of the changes say the department is not asking union leaders to supply any information that corporate leaders are not also required to provide.
Moreover, they point out that the changes are reasonable given that the Federal Election Commission has set a much lower threshold for financial disclosure at $200, while the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law holds that individual contributions to political campaigns cannot exceed $2000 because donations above that amount would cause corruption or reflect the appearance of corruption.
In April, a rift between the administration and the House Republicans developed when 28 pro-labor Republicans, led by Reps. Jack Quinn (N.Y.), Phil English (Pa.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), and Chris Smith (N.J.), wrote Chao, urging her to cancel the "unduly burdensome" regulations the department proposed to address what it sees as insufficient reporting of political, lobbying, and collective bargaining activities of labor organizations.
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