Labor department fails to release union corruption tracking report

[Dave]

Being that the report is almost a year late does make you kind of wonder. I'm not a big fan of unions by any means and if they are doing bad things, the public is entitled to know. I can see a month or 2 for the report to be late... a year late, not so much. Anyway, here's a story from Yahoo news......

 

The Office of Labor Management Statistics (OLMS) was supposed to release an annual report tracking labor unions and evidence of corruption in union leadership in January 2010 but still hasn’t released the document.

OLMS, which falls under the Department of Labor, has released no such tracking report since George W. Bush’s administration, something that
has the conservative nonprofit organization Americans for Limited
Government (ALG) up in arms. ALG filed a Freedom of Information Act
request for the 2009 report, and OLMS denied the group’s request by
saying it needed more time to complete the report. Originally, however,
those reports were publicly available on the OLMS website.

The report would tabulate the number of cases nationwide of union leader prosecution, the amount of funds they embezzle and the misuse of union
funds. It also would keep track of indictments. Those statistics do
exist elsewhere, as criminal and most civil court proceedings become
public record after the cases close, but they’re difficult to track down
as they’re in courthouses all over the country. The OLMS annual reports
kept track of that information, allowing people to access it easily.

ALG’s current head of research, Don Todd, who led OLMS during the Bush administration, told The Daily Caller he doubts it would be too
difficult for the Obama administration to release that information, as
they’re supposed to keep track of it all year long. He also said that
this administration’s failure to release the report is “freakishly
incompetent.” He suspects politics is to blame.

“It’s got to be a political decision,” Todd said in a phone interview. “You know, I ran the agency during the Bush administration, and it’s the
career people that put the thing together. So, the fact that it’s not
out is a political decision.”

Todd said he thinks the decision to withhold that information comes from the Secretary of Labor’s office, though, not President Barack Obama.

“I wouldn’t think it would reach anywhere near that high of a level,” Todd said, referring to why he doesn’t think Obama is calling these
shots. “But, the Labor Department is pretty much owned by the union movement now. A lot of the people who work there are from the movement.”

Also, Todd said that, without the report, he can’t say what’s in it, but that hiding it begs the question of what the Obama administration is
keeping under wraps.

Todd said what caught his attention in the OLMS response to ALG’s Freedom of Information Act request was that the agency didn’t say it
wasn’t going to do annual reports anymore. Instead, he said they wrote
back saying they were still working on it.

Todd isn’t sure whether the reasoning behind delaying the report’s release has anything to do with any evidence in it that suggests lack of
oversight or corruption, but he does point out that his successor, John
Lund, the current director of OLMS, was a top-level official in the AFL-CIO before he came to work for the Obama administration.

Todd said he knew the labor unions hated the information released in those reports, too.

“We listed the major cases,” Todd told TheDC. “Unions hate that kind of publicity. I kind of got the impression that the unions would rather
suffer from the embezzlement than from the negative publicity of people
stealing from them.”

OLMS spokesman Jesse Lawder told TheDC the report will be released soon, but did not know when. Lawder also said he did not why it has taken so
long for the report to come out.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20101222/pl_dailycaller/laborde...

[XLFD]

"It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative."
Barack Obama

 

Here, it's definitely more efficient (less work for the OLMS, except for dodging FOIA requests), in some ways more creative (in its suppression), but about as transparent as a steel door. 

 

In related news, Ludington City Hall had been doing a fairly good job of being open with their records over the last years, but have backtracked into being more closed.  The City Council meetings and all other meetings attended by the City Clerk, Deb Luskin, are generally up on the site about a week after the meeting.  Others that use the DDA's Heather Venzke, Assessor Carol Anne Foote, and others as recording secretary do not see the light of day for quite a while, if ever.  Here's this year's records of the Municipal Marina Board as an example, you will notice it looks a lot like last year except for the December entry.

 

http://www.ludington.mi.us/departments/municipal_marina/marina_boar...