-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama and his union-sold Department of Labor has spent the last three years trying every legal trick, and some merely arrogant ones, to help unions get away with criminal behavior. Obama has especially been working to get his union patrons out of having to declare their financial information to the government like businesses have to. This month, Obama’s DOL is implementing yet another transparency dodge for his union backers.
In an effort to further protect Big Labor, Obama’s Labor Sec., Hilda Solis — herself a life-long union activist — is about to announce a change in the definition of what an employer is so that it excludes unions that employ workers for their own offices and the like.
The original Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) has a pretty sensible definition of what an “employer” is. In essence, pretty much anyone that has employees is sensibly enough an employer.
But John Lund, Obama’s head of the Office of Labor Management (OLM), wants to change that definition to exclude all unions and labor consultants that themselves have employees. Why? Because if an employer is deemed not to be an employer then they don’t have to disclose information in new financial reports being demanded by changes in regulations implemented by the Obama regime.
As Don Loos notes, the original LMRDA was meant to give employees — all employees — a chance to see what their employers were doing.
As then Senator John F. Kennedy said,
“I do not say that the [LMRDA], or any law, under our Constitution, can eliminate Jimmy Hoffa. But we can eliminate the evil practices by which he and his associates rose to power, their conflict-of-interest transactions, their destruction of union books, their manipulation of trusteeships, their rigged elections and conventions, their appointments of ex-convicts as union officials, their use of management middlemen, their use of union funds to build personal financial empires, their private arrangements with employers, their shakedowns and tribute for unloading interstate trucks, their falsification of union reports, their reprisals against honest members…”
Yet, here we have Obama to come along and give the very unions that gave the nation the “evil practices” of Jimmy Hoffa right back to us.
As Loos says,
Solis and her handpicked Big Labor team at DOL have been systematically shredding the protections that the LMRDA was supposed to provide employees from unscrupulous union bosses and unscrupulous employers. Within a few months of taking office at the Labor Department Solis eliminated simple disclosure rules for labor unions that would have exposed union bosses “use of union funds to build personal financial empires.”
This isn’t the only thing that Obama has done to give cover and freebies to Big Labor, of course. Last September, for instance, Obama attempted to change a 75-year-old rule to allow unions to force a company into representation even if less than half the company’s employees voted in favor of the union. And last year Obama wanted to change rules to allow unions to organize employees of a company in double quick time.
This newest move is just one more example of Obama doing his best to give unions as much cover for their “unscrupulous” and evil practices” as he can.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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