Greetings Local 47 Colleagues,<\/p>\n
A couple more responses to the discussion concerning Unions,
\nLegislation and using dues for political purposes. <\/p>\n
It is our understanding that while the Local may choose to endorse a particular candidate, only money given voluntarily to TEMPO can be used for political purposes.
\nIf you don\u2019t want your money used, don\u2019t give it to TEMPO. This is further discussed by John Given below. <\/p>\n
If we are mistaken, please write in and let us know. <\/p>\n
Dear Comm Resp 47: <\/p>\n
>From Lisa Haley (feel free to post my name):
\n I’m very glad you are providing these different points of view. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Proposition 75 says: union bosses cannot force state and local workers to
\n pay them money for political causes the bosses like, but the workers don’t.
\n Today, every state and local government employee is forced to pay the union
\n boss money, just like the Communist party members in the old Soviet Union,
\n as a condition of having a government job. As an example, the California
\n Teachers Union has already assessed its membership additional dues
\n sufficient to raise $50 million to fight these initiatives, and whether the
\n member agrees or disagrees is irrelevant. <\/p>\n
Proposition 75 says no – the union boss has to get the employee’s written
\n agreement before he or she can spend their dues on some cause. That only
\n makes sense. It is the employee’s money, and forcing them to pay for
\n something they don’t like is just plain wrong. <\/p>\n
‘Solidarity’ should involve job security issues, not political issues. In
\n truth, we musicians are all small business owners. We are each different in
\n our views and preferences, and we should have the right to choose where our
\n political donation money goes, or doesn’t go, as we see fit. I would like
\n to see Prop 75 expanded to include not only government unions, but ALL union
\n members. This myth that all union members are staunch members of one
\n political party is exactly that – a myth. <\/p>\n
I have always felt that arbitrarily taking monies from Union members for use
\n by any political organisation, without a completely voluntary contribution
\n by the ‘donor’, is illegal. If unions can’t raise funds by voluntary means,
\n their purposes should be allowed to fail. Anything else is stealing from
\n members against their will. <\/p>\n
From John Given:<\/p>\n
I wasn’t going to continue this dialog, since the particular
\n legislative issue appears long-dead, but since I read Mr.
\nBlanc’s comments in the last edition, I thought I would answer
\nthem as best I can. This lengthy response would better fit a blog
\nor other web site, but the list is unfortunately the only way I know
\nto reach those who have been discussing it thus far. For those
\nthat care to skip it, please feel free. <\/p>\n
Rick Blanc wrote: <\/p>\n
> Of course they are Republicans because Democrats are the beneficiaries
\n> of union largesse, and no way
\n> do they want to publicize the fact that lots of disgruntled union
\n> members have been blindly made to contribute to their
\n> campaigns. <\/p>\n
I am not sure what Mr. Blanc means when he writes the above
\ncomment, since at the federal level, it has been several decades since unions
\n have been allowed to support political campaigns directly. This is
\n within 2 U.S.C. \u00a7 14, subchapter I, \u00a7 441 (b) – the citation may be
\n incorrectly formatted as I’m no legal expert, but here is the link: <\/p>\n
Perhaps Mr. Blanc is speaking of other lawful political activities, In any case, the amounts that labor has contributed to campaigns, while > Given’s remarks unwittingly support my own thoughts: 1) Republicans I don’t doubt that there are members of both major parties who truly > 2) Republicans want union members to know what their money is being I also see nothing wrong with wanting to know where the money goes. In The impression that I was left with after reading all of the testimony The bottom line remains that if you follow the links I provided, you > I would ask Mr. Givens for clarification on the Democratic Party’s That’s an ironic comment, since it was a democrat (JFK) who initially I don’t think it is my place to represent or defend the Democratic Though it is only tangentially related to the discussion, I believe Thanks for reading this far if you stuck with it. <\/p>\n Best regards, <\/p>\n John Given<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings Local 47 Colleagues, A couple more responses to the discussion concerning Unions, Legislation and using dues for political purposes. It is our understanding that while the Local may choose to endorse a particular candidate, only money given voluntarily to TEMPO can be used for political purposes. If you don\u2019t want your money used, don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-committee-newsletters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.responsible47.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n like lobbying, but since those do not contribute directly to campaigns
\n I find it hard to regard them as largesse. The AFM, like most (perhaps
\n all) unions, does have a “separate segregated fund” which is called
\n TEMPO. Since TEMPO contributions are completely voluntary, if one has
\n somehow “blindly been made” to contribute to them, the easy solution is
\n to stop writing checks to TEMPO. AFM contributions to campaigns are
\n relatively miniscule; in the last cycle, something like $50,000 was
\n distributed through TEMPO to candidates around the country (of both
\n parties). Contributions are voluntary, and are not made from dues at
\n all – you must make a separate contribution by law. It’s true that if
\n you contribute to TEMPO you cannot tell them which campaigns you want
\n to spend your money on, but since it is voluntary, and since you can
\n also support other campaigns directly, that is not really much of an
\n issue. <\/p>\n
\n a big number (about $61million to the ’04 congressional races), is
\n totally dwarfed by business donors, who generally favor Republicans
\n (the notable exceptions being in the communications sector and lawyers,
\n who both favor the democrats). In the ’04 cycle you might be surprised
\n to know that 13% of labor money went to Republicans. Labor money
\n represented only 4% of political contributions to congressional races
\n in the 2004 cycle, so it isn’t as profound an impact as you might have
\n thought. (These numbers are for the Congress only, I didn’t delve into
\n the Presidential race numbers, but I would suspect that the general
\n percentages were roughly similar.) Labor used to contribute
\n considerably more, when we were bigger and when the economy was doing
\n better. <\/p>\n
\n> want unions to be responsible to their
\n> membership; <\/p>\n
\n desire fully transparent unions, but to characterize the conservative
\n position as being pro- union members is seriously to misstate the
\n reality. Given the tremendous disparity in contributions from
\n business, it is equally likely that the Republicans on the subcommittee
\n were working toward a goal that was pro-business and anti-union. Or
\n perhaps it was both – in the service of their corporate sponsors, some
\n subcommittee members may have felt that they were also helping workers.
\n That is harder for me to accept at face value, but it is at least
\n plausible. <\/p>\n
\n> spent for. Excuse me but I see nothing wrong in the aforementioned.
\n> Given’s research, finding Republicans behind pending legislation to
\n> reform American labor unions proves that the Democrats are less
\n> concerned about the rights of union members. <\/p>\n
\n this particular case, I would argue that my research proves nothing of
\n the sort. If anything, the conclusion that I would make is that one
\n group of conservative politicians tried to make union reporting an even
\n more expensive task, when the mechanism for reporting is actually
\n working fairly well already. The “police” (the Dept. of Labor) are
\n simply not doing a respectable job of enforcing the law. But the
\n “reform” group tried to say (incorrectly and unsuccessfully, as it was
\n pointed out repeatedly by some committee members and witnesses) that
\n 43% of unions were not meeting their filing obligations. That number
\n was actually more like 1\/3 of that, and of unions with the most onerous
\n filing requirements (those with more than $200,000 of receipts
\n annually), 97% met their obligations fully, and it was still
\n undetermined of the remaining number which were late vs. the very few
\n who didn’t fulfill their obligations at all (and their was already a
\n mechanism in place to force them to do so that DOL wasn’t taking care
\n of). The witnesses brought by the committee (including the witness
\n from the department of labor) actually never answered all of the
\n questions that some of the committee members raised, so it is hard to
\n tell from the testimony just how big the problem actually was at the
\n time of the hearing in 2003. Moreover, even though the legislation was
\n moved out of the subcommittee, the Republican controlled Education and
\n the Workforce Committee didn’t do anything at all. So much for the
\n reform movement. (And in that election cycle the Republican chair,
\n Boehner, had actually taken $10,000 from the Carpenters Union, with one
\n of their members testifying for the new laws. I’m curious what other
\n members of the committee and subcommittee received labor money, but I
\n haven’t the time to research that just now). <\/p>\n
\n (and I did read it all – it was a bit of a snooze frankly), was that
\n the Education and the Workforce subcommittee was never seriously
\n committed to the legislation. It seemed that it was more of a public
\n relations exercise than anything else – something to prove that the
\n Republican controlled Congress was working on labor reform issues. <\/p>\n
\n would learn that you can very quickly find the LM-2 forms that your own
\n union files annually in order to know where all the money goes. I
\n gather from Mr. Blanc’s comments that he may not have bothered to do
\n so. It is far too easy to pretend that all of this disclosure is not
\n done properly than it is to actually go and look into it. The
\n mechanism does indeed work, and you can prove it by downloading the
\n LM-2 files at the Dept. of Labor’s web site. <\/p>\n
\n> proposals on union reform. THERE AIN’T ANY! <\/p>\n
\n sponsored the LMRDA, which was the ultimate reform in causing unions to
\n disclose how and where they spend union revenues. There is no question
\n that there were and likely remain some very corrupt unions, but it is
\n so much easier to research who gives what to who now, and everything is
\n more transparent than it used to be (though there are plenty of clever
\n people looking for loopholes all the time; 527’s anyone?). People
\n still tend to believe the stereotypes that they are fed to them by the
\n mainstream media about unions and corruption. Not that there isn’t
\n corruption still, but it is nowhere near as bad as it is made out to
\n be, certainly no where close to the more epidemic corruption of 50-70
\n years ago, and I believe it pales in comparison to the corruption in
\n other parts of our society and government (but that’s just a personal
\n opinion, I have no specific data to back me up other than what I read
\n in the papers, just like everyone else). <\/p>\n
\n party, I was simply commenting on the issue we had discussed about the
\n specific legislation that was mentioned on the list, presenting what I
\n had found in the hopes that it might be useful to someone. <\/p>\n
\n that serious campaign finance reform is the only solution to the
\n election quagmire that we have been in for many years, which makes
\n progress in fits and starts, in a very
\n two-steps-forward-one-step-backward kind of way. I would guess that
\n most of the readership of the Committee for a More Responsible Local 47
\n are probably on the same page about that particular issue. Since we
\n are all musicians, and likely very few of us have enough money to
\n impress politicians, the only way we will ever approach having an equal
\n voice is if the amount of money spent on elections is lowered
\n substantially, or if we band together and represent our views with a
\n unified voice in our union. Fortunately, we can at least do the latter. <\/p>\n