Obama Eases Union Accounts Reporting

Obama's Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, says she will not require labor unions to submit the more detailed accounting forms used by the Bush Administration as reported by Kevin Mooney of The Washington Examiner. These forms required the disclosure of financial information that provided union members some information on how the union was spending their union dues. They also helped to reveal ghost employees of the unions who had "no show jobs."

The Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS) is supposed to enforce the Labor Management and Reporting Disclosure Act (LMRDA), which requires annual financial reports by unions with receipts of $250,000 or more. A notice appeared this week on the Labor Department website saying:

Accordingly, OLMS will refrain from initiating enforcement actions against union officers and union employees based solely on the failure to file the report required by section 202 of the Labor-Management and Reporting Disclosure Act (LMRDA), 29 U.S.C. § 432, using the 2007 form, as long as individuals meet their statutorily-required filing obligation in some manner. OLMS will accept either the old Form LM-30 or the new one for purposes of this non-enforcement policy.

The Form LM-30 is the old form, which requires much less information than the Bush-Chao form does. But also notice that this statement announces this as a "non-enforcement policy."
This would seem to mean that the Department of Labor has no intention of actually requiring unions to comply with the LMRDA. It seems to in effect make it purely voluntary for a union to file either a Form LM-30 or the more detailed 2007 form, because after all the Department will not be enforcing the submission requirement of either!

There is no question that labor unions can do anything they want under the administration of Obama and under the Democrat Congress.