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DOL's Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) on January 16 had issued a lengthy final regulation (RIN: 1215-AB62) appearing in the January 21 Federal Register and set to take effect on February 20. The rule change would: 1) require disclosure of certain receipts and compensation not covered in changes to Form LM-2 introduced in 2003 and upheld in court two years later; and 2) authorize the department to rescind the right to file the simpler Form LM-3 if a union had been habitually delinquent or deficient. The intent was to keep union officials clear of conflicts of interest.

The White House has gone on the offensive even though the full Senate has yet to approve the nomination of Hilda Solis as labor secretary. Not only do Obama's people seek a 60-day delay on the new rule, they appear to want to rescind it. The administration transition team earlier reportedly favorably commented on an AFL-CIO memo calling for the administration to roll back all Bush-era DOL disclosure rules. The AFL-CIO for years has been insisting that toughened record-keeping requirements are unnecessary and costly. Yet that claim doesn't square away with the record. The first year of compliance with the expanded LM-2 form, for example, cost the federation only $54,150, not the more than $1 billion it had projected. And the added required details have proven useful in detecting numerous acts of embezzlement and fraud, especially as all submitted forms must be available for online viewing.

Opponents of the administration note that union officials are likely to abuse the trust of members in absence of strict Labor Department monitoring, especially in non-Right to Work states where maintaining one's job is conditioned upon dues payments.

In a letter to OLMS Director Denise M. Boucher dated February 9, Mark Mix, president of the Springfield, Va.-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, explained:

I am writing to urge you to prevent delay in implementation of final rule RIN 1215-AB62 regarding Labor Organization Annual Financial Reports. At a time when many are questioning the perks and special benefits of corporate executives, this is not a time to continue the concealment of union executive perks and benefits...

Mix provided a few examples of union sleight of hand that the latest revised LM-2 form likely would discourage. The International Association of Machinists spends millions annually on its LearJet, but the actual cost of each flight does not correspond to any one person's name.
In 2005, Plumbers Local 98 in Michigan disbursed $491,252 worth of fringe benefits to nine full-time officers, an average of nearly $55,000 per officer. If the Obama administration cancels the new rule, it would hamper the ability of union members to see if their representatives are paid in accordance with their organizations' constitution.

The Obama White House doesn't seem impressed by such appeals. The president and his top aides owe much of their careers to organized labor. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel previous to his current job had chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. During his tenure, the committee had received over $1.1 million in direct contributions from organized labor during the 2008 election cycle. And the Service Employees International Union donated $27 million in PAC money to Obama's presidential run. Obama knows who his friends are, which is why he won an endorsement from the SEIU early in 2008. "I've spent my entire adult life working with SEIU," he noted at the union's Political Action Conference in September 2007. "I'm not a newcomer to this. I didn't just discover SEIU on the campaign trail...So we all know what we need to do to reverse the anti-labor policies of this (Bush) administration." A month into office, President Obama has proven to be a man of his word. Unfortunately, his word may provide a license to steal for union officials, business agents and office employees.

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.

It's an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

Sen. Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, has declined to take a stance on Teamsters oversight. During his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton took no action to end the special board. Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004 -- Al Gore and John Kerry -- didn't address the issue, according to Teamsters officials.

Neither Sen. Obama nor Teamsters President James P. Hoffa has spoken publicly about easing up federal oversight, a top priority for Mr. Hoffa since he became union president in 1999...

But John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was "pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end" of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Sen. Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed the candidate's position in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, saying that Sen. Obama believes that the board "has run its course," because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." Mr. Vietor said Sen. Obama took that position last year...

Officials at the Obama campaign and the Teamsters say there was no quid pro quo between the union endorsement and Sen. Obama's position on ending federal oversight.

Bret Caldwell, a Teamsters spokesman, said the union's endorsement was "predicated in no way, shape or form" on the consent decree. Mr. Caldwell said that only a court can do away with the oversight, not the president. "The only way that this is going to be resolved is through the court system, there can't be a political solution," he said.

But Mr. Caldwell said the president could appoint people to the Justice Department and courts who also favored ending the consent decree.

"It certainly wouldn't hurt to have a president who came out and said that they would support getting the oversight out of our union," Mr. Caldwell said...

Officials at the Teamsters oversight board share Sen. Obama's assessment that mob influence has dramatically fallen. But they say the union would have trouble continuing the anticorruption effort without the board. "When we have a case involving a member of organized crime and we send that to the union, the union automatically sends that back to us because they can't handle it," said John Cronin, who has been the administrator for the review board since it was created.

And, board members say, it would be extraordinary for a president to try to alter the oversight. "Presidents very rarely try to tell the Justice Department what is the right thing to do in matters of judicial administration," said William Webster, a member of the board since 1992 and a former director of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency...

Shortly before the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, Mr. Hoffa visited a York Peppermint Pattie plant in Reading that is slated to be closed. He blamed free-trade agreements negotiated by Sen. Clinton's husband when he was president. Mr. Hoffa tells workers that trade agreements enacted recently have made is easier for companies to move jobs to Mexico and China.


On the campaign trail, Mr. Hoffa (left) stresses Sen. Obama's criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"What they're saying is they're going to take this thing and put a sombrero on it," he told workers, pointing to their Peppermint Pattie plant. Mr. Hoffa handed out giant posters of a bright yellow sombrero and told workers at the Teamsters-organized plant to hang them up inside the plant. "This is the kind of crap they're doing," he told one worker as he signed his sombrero poster.

Just before the Peppermint Pattie stop, Sen. Obama called Mr. Hoffa, as the union leader sat at a diner eating eggs sunny-side-up and toast. Mr. Hoffa says he told Sen. Obama about the plant and suggested he include it in his stump speech.

Later that day, Sen. Obama issued a statement saying that working families can't wait "while the same old Washington players play the same old Washington game, while factories like the York Peppermint Pattie plant in Reading move to Mexico in search of cheap labor."

The posh Miami Fontainebleu Hotel will play host to Vice President Biden, Hilda Solis, and the AFL-CIO executive council this week, as union bosses work tirelessly to spend employees' hard-earned forced dues on $1000 per night rooms and critical projects like sampling each of the facility's eleven restaurants, thoroughly testing the resort's 40,000 square foot spa, and enjoying the sights and sounds of Miami Beach:

The conference will also cover union bosses' novel approach to economic recovery, which involves forcing more unwilling workers into union collectives through the grossly misnamed "Employee Free Choice Act." But we're not quite sure how extracting millions of dollars in additional forced union dues is supposed to revive our flagging economy -- perhaps the AFL-CIO plans to single-handedly save the luxury resort business by scheduling more conferences?

Of course, history tells us handing more forced unionism power over to union bosses will only make the current economic downturn even worse.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget...

...The wages at issue involve workers who care for some 440,000 low-income disabled and elderly Californians. The workers, who collectively contribute millions of dollars in dues each month to the influential Service Employees International Union and the United Domestic Workers, will see the state's contribution to their wages cut from a maximum of $12.10 per hour to a maximum of $10.10.

The SEIU said in a statement that it had asked the Obama administration for the ruling.

Roughly two hours before the President took the stage for his second press conference in as many months, SEIU's president Andy Stern was spotted leaving the West Wing of the White House.

The labor leader's visit comes just a few hours after Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) announced that he would not, as he did in 2007, vote for cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act, a union legislative priority. So it seems likely that Stern and the officials with whom he met had much to discuss.

Barack Obama sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act while in the Senate and has offered short but supportive statements advocating the measure since his election. An email earlier in the day to get the administration's response to Specter's proclamation went unreturned.