In a troubling, but not unprecedented example of the abuses that come with radical teacher unions, the Associated Press reports that 700 public school teachers in New York City are enjoying full salaries of $70,000 to not teach:

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

With the economy continuing to struggle and local and state governments facing budget shortfalls, the "rubber room" program’s hefty $65 million per year bill to the taxpayers raises serious questions —  even putting aside the institutional problems of a compulsory unionism system that prevents individual teachers from discussing terms of employment with principals and school boards.

Let me see if I understand teacher union bosses’ priorities correctly.  Teachers exercising their right to refrain from union membership?  A fireable offense.  Sexual misconduct?  $70,000 a year and a free place to hang out and play board games. Shameless.

A California union boss is under investigation for soliciting bribes from financial firms who wanted to invest in Big Labor’s pet political projects. 

Sean Harrigan, a former top official with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFWC) union, was also a board member of California’s massive public pension fund (CalPERS). Instead of working to safeguard workers’ pension plans, however, Harrigan used his position to steer lucrative state investments toward financial firms who agreed to contribute to the UFCW’s political programs:

Financial firms showered nearly $1 million in political cash on the United Food and Commercial Workers union in California while a top union leader sat on the boards of big public pension funds in the state, an analysis of campaign finance records shows.

Sean Harrigan [2], the union’s former executive director, is now under scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has charged several firms and individuals with making improper payments to win investments from pension funds in New York and New Mexico.

Harrigan, 62, stepped down from the board of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension [3] system last month in response to the SEC inquiry into his dealings while at the fund. He was appointed to the LA fund in 2005 after serving as a trustee and board president at CalPERS from 1999 through late 2004.

Whoops. Apparently, appointing corrupt union bosses to oversee millions of public dollars is a bad idea. The Sacramento Bee has a helpful list of Harrigan’s greatest hits:

An examination of campaign contribution records, disclosures CalPERS board members file when they have contacts with money managers and documents outlining approved deals show the UFCW campaign fund received contributions from money managers as their deals were being considered by the CalPERS board. 

Among the examples:

• In July 2001, CalPERS closed a $125 million deal with urban developer CIM Group after board members – including Harrigan – initially rejected it.

On March 18, 2003, the board approved up to $280 million with the CIM California Real Estate Fund, supplementing the initial $125 million. Seventeen days later, CIM donated $12,000 to the UFCW union fund, records show.

Harrigan, meanwhile, bought a penthouse apartment at Sky Lofts, one of the CIM projects that CalPERS backed in downtown Los Angeles for $887,500 in 2006, according to property records.

In other words, firms’ investment proposals magically sailed through as long as UFCW bosses got their cut. Adding insult to injury, Harrigan allegedly received a favorable real estate deal from the same firm whose investment fund he’d just approved.

Keep in mind that these are the same union bosses who routinely disburse millions of dollars in compulsory union dues from employees across the country. Harrigan himself was the former Executive Director of the UCFW – do you think he was any more trustworthy with workers’ dues than he was with California’s pension fund? 

The answer, of course, is no. Corruption is endemic to Big Labor’s massive political fundraising apparatus, and this sordid incident of corruption is just one more example why union bosses should not be given the power to force workers to pay dues or be fired.

With all the controversy surrounding card check legislation, it’s worth talking to workers who’ve actually experienced the procedure first-hand. With that in mind, the National Right to Work Foundation interviewed several employees who endured intimidation, harassment and coercion at the hands of union organizers during an actual card check drive. After UAW organizers forced their way into the workplace through the coercive card check scheme, the workers forced a secret ballot decertification vote (using a precedent won by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys) and tossed out the unwanted union.

Here’s the video:

Freedom@Work readers are aware that President Barack Obama has routinely paid back the one billion dollar debt he and other forced unionism proponents owe to union bosses for their record political spending spree in the 2008 election cycle.  From blacklisting workers who exercise their right to refrain from union membership to rolling back union boss disclosure requirements, Obama has gladly used his executive power to return the favor. 

As reported previously, several high-profile Obama nominees to key positions with the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board are longtime Big Labor lobbyists and compulsory unionism hardliners, most notably Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis (who was treasurer of the Big Labor lobby American Rights at Work while serving as a member of Congress) and NLRB member-nominee Craig Becker (whose views on union organizing are radical even by Big Labor’s standards).

Conveniently, and without irony, the AFL-CIO’s blog features an extensive list of other union bigwigs Obama has named to key labor positions, including:

Julia Clark, general counsel for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and Ernie DuBester, a former AFL-CIO Legislative Affairs staff member, were nominated by President Obama last week to serve on the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA)—the federal workers’ version of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

…

Ron Bloom, United Steelworkers’ (USW’s) director of corporate research, was appointed senior adviser on the auto bailout team.

…

Mary Beth Maxwell, the former executive director of American Rights at Work, was appointed senior adviser to Solis at the Labor Department. In addition, the former Housing Investment Trust (HIT) lawyer, Helen Karnovsky, is now general counsel at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; former United Food and Commerical Workers attorney Carol Clifford is labor liaison at the Department of Agrictulture; and Naomi Walker, assistant director for Legislative Affairs, is now associate deputy secretary of labor.

What happened to Obama’s supposed strident ethics policy or keeping his appointees out of areas where they regulate or otherwise deal with their former employers?  Another special privilege for union bosses.

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.

—

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. 

In the third and final installment of his interview with Jason Lewis, Foundation President Mark Mix discusses the implications of Big Labor’s Police and Firefighters Monopoly Bargaining Bill. Click here to listen or use the embedded player below: