UAW Honcho Gary Jones Pleads Guilty to Embezzlement

Today Gary Jones, the indicted, recently resigned chief of the United Auto Workers (UAW, AFL-CIO) union, pleaded guilty to embezzlement. Jones’ indictment alleged embezzlement of “more than $1 million,” some of which was spent on “personal luxuries,” including “private villas.”

Robert Snell and Breana Noble explained in a mid-May Detroit News article about Jones’ federal arraignment that he is the “highest-ranking UAW official charged” in the “crackdown on corruption” within the U.S. auto industry.  The probe has revealed that Organized Labor officials and auto executives colluded with one another to break federal labor laws, steal union funds, and engage in bribery.

Before today, the ongoing investigation had already resulted in nine UAW bosses’ pleading guilty to federal crimes.  The widow of a deceased UAW vice president also entered a guilty plea. Just months after his installation as UAW president in 2018, Jones was first publicly connected to the rampant lawbreaking.  At that time rank-and-file autoworkers and other citizens learned about curious UAW-boss expenditures of “almost $1 million,” most of it taken from forced dues-laden union treasuries, “on condominiums, liquor, food and golf in California, where Jones held annual conferences before becoming president.”

According to prosecutors, a conspiracy was forged in 2010 involving Jones, his immediate predecessor as UAW president, Dennis Williams, and other top union bosses.  It continued for roughly nine years, ending in September 2019  The charges against Jones and his coconspirators, indicted and unindicted, primarily involved theft of workers’ forced-dues money.  Gary Jones and several other top union bosses appear collectively to have embezzled millions of dollars of dues extracted from workers, in many cases as a condition of keeping their jobs.

In a bid to reduce his sentence, Jones is expected to cooperate with ongoing investigations of current UAW President Rory Gamble, Williams, and former UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles.

Snell and Noble sources claim:  “Investigators are probing allegations of strip club payoffs in exchange for contracts to supply union-branded merchandise, . . . as well as financial ties” between Gamble, Settles, “and one of the union’s highest-paid vendors.”  With Jones’ cooperation, federal investigators are building criminal cases “that could lead the Justice Department to seize control” of the corrupt UAW union.

Perhaps partially motivated by concern about federal authorities’ seizing control over the UAW, the union’s top bosses are already, and not surprisingly, heavily involved in 2020 partisan politics.

On April 21, Boss Gamble released a statement endorsing Big Labor Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential bid and takeover of the U.S. Justice Department.  UAW union political operatives will deploy millions of dollars in dues money for schemes to elect Biden and other pro-union monopoly candidates.  Forced dues and fees forked over by autoworkers and workers in other other UAW-organized industries in states that still lack Right to Work protections for employees, such as Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, will fuel this 2020 electioneering campaign against workers’ wishes.

In exchange for campaign money and troops, Biden publicly vows to push for a “national ban” on state Right to Work laws, overturning protections for the personal freedom to refuse to join or bankroll a union that American workers in 27 states already enjoy.

Unionized autoworkers in Right to Work states may be forced to accept officers from the shady UAW as their “exclusive” bargaining agents, but they cannot be forced to fork over union dues or fees to UAW coffers to keep their jobs.

If Big Labor Biden gets his way, American workers’ freedom to reject paying money to corrupt union officials like Gary Jones, without being fired, will disappear.