Union Workers - Take Back Your Economy

by Brad Peck

In a conversation recently I was given some insight into the nature what unions consider a grievous, "anti-union" action. The gentleman who told me the story said that I could use it provided I didn’t use his name, as he didn’t want the local organizers showing up at his house, as they are wont to do.

Here’s the situation, the storyteller is the administrator for an organization in which 40% of the employees are represented by the AFL-CIO and 60% are not. The local AFL-CIO organizer for the represented workers accosted him as he was going to work one day and told him that they were going to file a complaint of anti-union activity by the organization.  The activity in question? - the distribution of annual Benefit Guides to employees. 

It seems that the employees were comparing the benefits offered by organization to non-union workers to the benefits "secured" by the union and found that union benefits were sub-par.  This led many union workers to question the organizer on what exactly they were getting for their union dues and the non-union workers to laugh at him when he pitched them to join the union. This situation was deemed un-fair by the AFL-CIO organizer who preferred that workers not be allowed to see their own existing benefits.

I thought of this yesterday as I read the Hudson Institute’s new study which found serious under-funding among many union-sponsored pension plans. I wondered if the workers at the organization knew that not only were the union benefits underwhelming, it was possible, at least on the pension side, that they might be under-funded as well.

According to the study, employer-controlled pension plans notably outperformed union pension funds and collectively bargained pension plans were more poorly funded than their non-union counterparts.  While 36.5% of non-union plans were fully-funded, only 19% of union plans met this criterion.

The study also found that several unions, including the SEIU, were well-funding the private pension plans reserved for their officers and executives, while allowing the pension plans for their rank-and-file members to slide toward insolvency. The Hudson Institute study also discovered that some union executives were using their members’ and employees’ retirement assets to pursue political agendas through shareholder activism.

As the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) pats itself on the back during "Take Back the Economy" rallies today, maybe the rank-and-file participants should take a moment to ask their leaders to stop shortchanging workers’ retirements and stop using employees’ retirement assets to pursue political agendas through shareholder activism.