Fox Business has a great report on union bosses’ extravagant spending habits, including lavish junkets and visits to luxury resort hotels:
Besides the tens-of-millions of dollars big labor spent buying luxury resorts, country clubs or Learjets, labor unions are also spending millions of dollars in tax-free union funds on conferences at lavish hotels and resorts — including junkets at resorts owned by the unions themselves . . .
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), run by Richard Trumka, is the largest umbrella federation of unions in the U.S., with 56 unions representing more than 12 million. Its officials have been living large at member expense.
AFL-CIO unions spent at least $2.6 million in union funds on junkets to nine conferences at places like the Flamingo Hotel or Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, including more than $1.7 million at the swanky union-ownedWestin Diplomat resort and golf club in Florida, from 2010 to 2011, government documents show . . .
Luxury getaways aren’t the only thing Big Labor is buying, however. According to The Wall Street Journal, unions spent over 4.4 billion dollars on electioneering from 2005 to 2011, a figure that exceeds previous estimates (except for two studies by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research) by a factor of four:
The usual measure of unions’ clout encompasses chiefly what they spend supporting federal candidates through their political-action committees, which are funded with voluntary contributions, and lobbying Washington, which is a cost borne by the unions’ own coffers. These kinds of spending, which unions report to the Federal Election Commission and to Congress, totaled $1.1 billion from 2005 through 2011,according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The unions’ reports to the Labor Department capture an additional $3.3 billion that unions spent over thesame period on political activity.
The costs reported to the Labor Department range from polling fees, to money spent persuading union members to vote a certain way, to bratwursts to feed Wisconsin workers protesting at the state capitol last year. Much of this kind of spending comes not from members’ contributions to a PAC but directly from unions’ dues-funded coffers. There is no requirement that unions report all of this kind of spending to the Federal Election Commission, or FEC.
Much of this political cash is collected from nonunion workers forced to pay dues as a condition of employment. These employees aren’t affiliated with unions and often disagree with their political agenda. Technically, union officials are supposed to allow nonunion employees to opt out of paying for union political spending, but – as recent Right to Work cases demonstrate – that requirement is often ignored or actively subverted.
Whether it’s politics or luxury junkets, the only real solution to Big Labor’s lavish spending is right to work laws, which make the payment of union dues strictly voluntary. The power to extract dues from unwilling workers has made union bosses unaccountable. If unions were solely dependent on voluntary contributions, they’d be much less likely to risk alienating their supporters with divisive political lobbying or lavish getaways for the higher-ups.
