Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010343" target="_blank">http://www.opinionjournal.com/ diary/?id=110010343</a> >>The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law. In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration's budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight. Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don't have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don't have to follow standard accounting methods. OLMS, the Labor office that watches over union disclosure forms, says that last year 93% of unions met its reporting requirements. But the other 7% deserve scrutiny. Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. They might want to know that in 2005, the National Education Association gave more than $65 million to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and dozens of other liberal advocacy groups that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers. In 2006, 49 individuals employed at the national AFL-CIO headquarters were paid more than $130,000. "Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining," says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. The OLMS reporting requirements date back to the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, the last major revision of federal labor law. The American Law Encyclopedia notes that then-Sen. John F. Kennedy "was instrumental in inserting title I of the act, which has been dubbed the union bill of rights." It mandated that union votes be by secret ballot, that unions file reports on large payments and loans to union officers, and that all members have access to union financial records and the right to recover misappropriated union assets. Its provisions led directly led to the creation of the Labor Department office that Democrats now consider the lone example of bloated government. Far from oppressing unions with burdensome reporting requirements, the Office of Labor Management Standards is doing what governments often do best: provide information and punish people who abuse the public trust. It has posted an impressive array of data on union governance at its Web site, unionreports.gov, where any dues-paying member can access it. Investigations conducted by OLMS also have led to an impressive list of successful prosecutions of union officials. Just last week Willie Haynes, a member of the Saginaw, Mich., City Council who also served as a United Auto Workers financial secretary, pleaded guilty to falsifying his union local's reports. In May, Chuck Crawley, a former Teamster's local president in Houston, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for stuffing a ballot box so he could be elected president of his union local and embezzling dues money. GOP Rep. John Kline of Minnesota will offer an amendment Thursday to restore $3 million of the $11 million planned cutback in OLMS's budget, so its budget would merely be restored to its 2007 level. Whatever sums are spent on union disclosure reports appear to be a good investment. Unions held $22 billion in assets in 2005, and you'd think that a modest enforcement budget, representing less than 0.003% of that amoun,t shouldn't be the only target for cuts by budget appropriators. Union officials have publicly stated that they believe many of OLMS's requirements are burdensome and unnecessary. Since unions helped elect the current Congress, they are now seeking action on their agenda, which ranges from holding fewer secret ballot elections to cutting back on the oversight that is at the heart of the 1959 union "bill of rights" that JFK championed. << Unions should have just as much oversight as Corporations, not less.
Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11786" target="_blank">http://www.spectator.org/dsp_a rticle.asp?art_id=11786</a> >>Unfortunately, resources, competence, and energy are needed in prodigious quantities at OLMS. Just as there are criminal corporations (think Enron), there are criminal unions. So the OLMS has been quite busy. Last year the Office handled 2617 cases of delinquent or deficient reports, conducted 133 election investigations, and supervised 33 elections. The OLMS processed 339 criminal cases involving financial integrity, won 118 indictments and 129 convictions, and conducted 741 compliance audits and seven follow-up audits. Since 2007 the Office has won 760 convictions in union corruption cases. Investigations are up 20 percent and convictions are up 26 percent. Union functionaries forced to operate in the sunlight undoubtedly view the agency's activities as inconvenient at best, but union members benefit enormously. The OLMS does not control or limit labor spending in any way. It simply requires unions to let their members, and the rest of us, know what the unions are doing. People want to know: between May 2006 and May 2007 the OLMS website received nearly 768,000 hits, around 2,100 daily. When polled on the issue, union members back federal public disclosure to help deter wrongdoing by union officials. The information collected speaks both generally and specifically. Because of the Office, union members can learn how much of their dues goes to officer compensation and political uses, two areas prone to abuse. The individual spending items always prove interesting. For instance, John J. Miller points to the purchase by the Ironworkers Local 40 of a $52,879 Cadillac as a "retirement gift." After viewing the forms, Furchtgott-Roth cited high salaries, costly board meetings at golf resorts, and Learjet as dubious purchases. She notes: "Perhaps there's nothing wrong with spending union dues on golf or on high salaries for union bosses. Perhaps the rank-and-file don't disapprove -- if they know." OLMS's job is to make sure that they know. EVEN MORE IMPORTANT ARE prosecutions for embezzlement, theft, and other financial abuses. In 2006 a multi-year case involving no-show jobs by three New York City's Elevator Constructors Local 1, Laborers Local 79, and Operating Engineers Local 14, generated another 14 convictions, for a total of 35. Indictments were issued against IBEW Local 212 for the use of fraudulent payroll forms. Additional prison sentences were handed down in multi-million dollar embezzlement and fraud cases involving several top leaders of the Washington Teachers' Union. The OLMS went after embezzlement at the Longshoremen's Association Local 1740. The Office prosecuted embezzlement by officials of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and Service Employees International Union Local 99. Other recent prosecutions include for embezzlement and kickbacks at the National Association of Letter Carriers, embezzlement and fraud by a Teamsters local, embezzlement at a Steelworkers Local, embezzlement and larceny at the New York State Nurses Association, embezzlement at the Washington Teachers' Union, and embezzlement at the Sheet Metal Workers union. Other unions include the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 763-C (Joliet, Ill.), Service Employees Local 150 (Milwaukee, Wisc.), Wisconsin Professional Police Association, AFSCME Local 1522 (Bridgeport, Conn.), Musicians Local 92 (Buffalo, N.Y.), and Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 5 and Teamsters Local 996 (Hawaii). There are many more. It's obvious that organized labor is unable or unwilling to police its own. These cases involve behavior that is criminal in any context. If not the OLMS, who is going to protect labor union members from leaders engaged in looting and pillaging? What arguments are there for cutting back OLMS's efforts? There obviously is abundant union corruption and misbehavior to investigate and punish. There obviously are significant union abuses to publicize. The OLMS has been active and productive in doing so. Actually, these facts are why labor unions are complaining. The unions claim that the disclosure requirements are too expensive. Obviously, regulatory oversight involves a balance. When the OLMS proposed revising the LM-2 disclosure form in 2005, requiring unions to list any expenditure above $250, criticism from organized labor caused the Bush administration to set the threshold at $5000. The AFL-CIO's John Sweeney claimed that compliance would "cost union members an estimated billion dollars a year," with the average union bill at $1.2 million. The AFL- CIO actually paid out $54,150--a quarter of Sweeney's salary, John J. Miller notes. That hardly seems an unreasonable price for ensuring that the union's millions of members are kept informed about their union's activities, supposedly on their behalf.<<
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/in/hypnosonic/Parable_of_the_Monkeys.html" target="_blank">http://www.angelfire.com/in/hy pnosonic/Parable_of_the_Monkeys.html</a> "Eddington, 1929 ... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel. A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures, 1927. New York: Macmillan, 1929, page 72. Jeans, 1930 ... It was, I think, Huxley, who said that six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page which a particular monkey had typed, and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance. In the same way, millions of millions of stars wandering blindly through space for millions of millions of years are bound to meet with every sort of accident, and so are bound to produce a certain limited number of planetary systems in time. Yet the number of these must be very small in comparison with the total number of stars in the sky. Sir James Jeans. The Mysterious Universe. New York: Macmillian Co., 1930, page 4." Much more at the link.
