Just when the Obama Administration eliminates union boss disclosure that exposed union officer perks and self-dealing, a union boss has to get busted for demanding bribes from a trial lawyer. His actions certainly do not argue for the Administration’s ongoing effort to roll back union disclosure.
The Associate Press reports:
The president of a national railroad employees union was arrested at his Ohio home on Tuesday and charged with bribery.
Edward Rodzwicz, who heads the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, is accused of soliciting and accepting $20,000 in bribes from a St. Louis lawyer. In exchange, prosecutors say, Rodzwicz allowed the lawyer to remain on a list of attorneys approved to handle injury cases for union members.
But wait a minute, we’ve seen this type of bribe before! On the undercover video provided on the National Right To Work Committee’s YouTube channel embedded below, a different railroad union official accepted a bribe from a trial lawyer. This videotape was part of an investigation that put two former union presidents in jail:
[youtube m-6FXeB6_Xc]
The Obama Administration has loaded the U.S. Department of Labor with Big Labor cronies whose central mission appears to be hiding union boss perks and conflicts of interests from rank-and-file workers who pay their salaries.
About the time the Justice Department put together the sting operation using investigators from the Department of Labor and the FBI (shown in video above); several trial lawyers began to meet to decide how to avoid reporting their payments to union officials in this pay-to-play scheme. Two lawsuits were eventually filed against Secretary Elaine Chao in an attempt to stop the Labor Department’s enforcement of this conflict-of-interest reporting requirements.
More shocking is that the Obama Labor Department cited these lawsuits as part of the reason for its decision not to enforce conflict-of-interest disclosure for union bosses:
“Fundamental questions regarding the scope and extent of the reporting obligations are unanswered, and litigation challenging some aspects of the form remains pending. Yet, by March 31, 2009, reports for calendar year 2008 must be filed. In light of this uncertainty, the pending regulatory action, the pending litigation and the rapidly approaching filing deadline, OLMS has determined that it would not be a good use of resources to bring enforcement actions based upon a failure to use a specific form to comply with the statutory obligation to report certain financial information.”
The lawyers lost their appeal, but there is still hope for these train-chasing trial lawyers that Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and her big labor insiders will rewrite this disclosure to the trial lawyers’ liking as she began last Friday to do for union bosses by rescinding meaningful union financial disclosure.
It appears that the Obama Administration has chosen to play Chicago-style insider politics rather than protect rank-and-file workers. They continue to completely ignore the real burdens placed on workers by union officials who have the power to fire workers for failure to pay union dues as a condition of getting and keeping a job. Then, they use this power to force workers to pay for union bosses’ perks.
Solis’ excuse for rescinding important union financial disclosure was that the rule put a “burden” on union officials who failed to file required reports. In other words, she did not want to burden union officials who were ignoring the law. Further, she also stopped enforcement of union officer conflict-of-interest disclosure reporting requirements.
Under this Administration, we should expect to see many more of these pay-to-play deals with union bosses.
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