The 2024 election saw swaths of rank-and-file unionized workers defy the official endorsements made by union bosses who claim to "represent" those workers.
President Donald Trump and Republicans benefited from the numerous union voters who spurned top union officials' nearly unanimous support for Kamala Harris and most Democrats.
That's why it is especially puzzling that Trump appointees at the Department of Labor recently proposed making it harder for rank-and-file workers to learn how their dues money is being spent, especially on political expenditures that are so frequently out of touch with workers' actual priorities.
Following congressional hearings in the 1950s into corruption and criminality among union officials, Congress passed a law mandating annual financial disclosures.
By viewing the resulting union LM-2 filings, workers can see the salaries of the union officials, a list of the recipients of union dues money, and expenditures categorized as "political activities and lobbying."
Unsurprisingly, much of that political spending defies the priorities of Trump-voting union members. That's why it was shocking in July when the Trump Labor Department announced it wanted to exempt from LM-2 filing requirements an estimated 868 unions with annual receipts between $250,000 and $450,000.
These unions are not small operations.
They spent a total of over $288 million in 2024 and controlled over $465 million in assets.
Even worse, 571 of those unions are in the 24 states that lack Right to Work laws, meaning private sector workers can be fired if they do not contribute to union finances.
This is especially concerning when you consider the partisan and divisive ways that unions of all sizes spend workers' dues money.
In 2024, LM-2 filings revealed union political contributions to such organizations as ActBlue, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic National Committee.
All these contributions came from unions that would no longer have to submit these disclosures under the new rule (meaning next election cycle, those contributions can be hidden from workers).
What’s more, during the 2024 election, union bigwigs poured $54.5 million directly into Democratic nominee Kamala Harris's coffers (and who knows how much more through various intermediaries), compared to just $211,000 to President Trump. But this happened despite surveys and exit polls showing that many rank-and-file union members supported the President.
With the President’s support from working Americans, the Labor Department should be prioritizing rank-and-file workers who have frequently been betrayed by the union bosses who claim to represent them.
Predictably, those bosses support the new rule that will allow them to hide their spending more easily from those they claim to "represent." Their claims that the current reporting thresholds create a major burden, however, ring hollow.
Not only have unions already been providing this data for years, but advances in accounting and recordkeeping technology mean reports can now be completed in a matter of hours (not the weeks the Department claims based on decades-old estimates).
As highlighted in the National Right to Work Foundation's comments opposing the change, one United Autoworkers official even bragged that with modern accounting software, preparing LM filings is now as simple as "the press of a button."
While union officials celebrate the reduced transparency, 292 of the 299 public comments submitted oppose the rule.
Among them are many former union workers who slammed the decreased transparency as emblematic of the treatment of employees by Big Labor.
"I was forced to pay union dues from my meager salary when I was a university professor, whether I chose to be a member or not," wrote one commenter. "I learned early on to not trust unions or union bosses to represent the best interests of their members or the general public."
Fortunately, the change is thus far just a proposal. It's not too late for the Trump Labor Department to reverse course, listen to the 97% of commenters opposed to the rule, and scrap it.
Or better, the department should follow the suggestions of several commenters and go further, amending the disclosure requirements to give workers more information, not less, about how their union dues are being spent.
That change would bring the Labor Department in line with President Trump's promise to have a truly pro-worker administration.
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the National Right to Work Committee. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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