Belabor the Point

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal weighs in on Democrat leaders’ most recent attempt to “cut spending” and benefit the Big Labor bosses. Highlights include:

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. . . .

Far from oppressing unions with burdensome reporting requirements, the Office of Labor Management Standards [OLMS] 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.

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.

The Big Labor payback by congressional leaders continues.