This is typical of collectivist organizations, whether it’s the communist party or the SEIU, the Teamsters, the UAW, or the AFL-CIO. Actually, they are all one in the same.
The leaders of the collective always make sure they’re taken care of first and then give what’s left over to the members. Even more repugnant, the bosses who unethically carve out the best for themselves simultaneously stoke the fires of suspicion and fear about management to keep the rank and file blindly loyal to them. They beat the drum that the bosses are protecting them from the evil vampire-like corporations. It’s been a lie the unions have told for years. But now, it’s beginning to unravel. From The Daily Caller:
Union officers’ pension plans are significantly better funded than the plans they negotiate for their rank-and-file counterparts, raising questions about whether union members have been manipulated by those they trust to bargain for them.
The average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent, according to a September study by the Hudson Institute. None of the staff pensions are on the Department of Labor’s list of critically underfunded pension plans, while more than half of rank-and-file pension plans are endangered. (A pension is considered “endangered” by the government when it contains less than 80 percent of the assets needed to cover its liabilities.)
Some are questioning why pension plans negotiated by union leaders on behalf of union members are performing so poorly while the leaders’ pension funds remain healthy.
“Unions are pay and benefits experts — they know this stuff six ways to Sunday, it’s their raison d’etre,” said Brett McMahon, the Vice President of Miller and Long Construction and a member of the national trade association Associated Builders and Contractors.” It’s not as if they can claim some kind of ignorance about this, that by chance or happenstance these are funded better than those. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
“You’re not supposed to pay yourself first, but they do, and they pay themselves quite well, and then they appear to bargain for their membership,” said McMahon. “If they were really dedicated to what they were doing, which I think at [one] point they were, decades ago, it wouldn’t look like this.”
Of course they know what they’re doing. They’ve cowed their members into feeling indebted to the union for their salaries and benefits by convincing them that if it weren’t for the bosses, corporate management would have treated them like slave labor all these years. The bosses are happily sitting in the catbird seat and will sail into the sunset with generously funded pensions while the US taxpayers are stuck paying the union members’ under-funded pensions to the tune of $8 – $10 billion, as the unions continue to recruit members using pensions as a selling point. I suspect we’ll see the bosses somehow convince their members that the *evil* corporations are to blame for the funding discrepancy. Maybe they’ll blame Republicans. Better yet, Bush.
Will the union bosses be criminally prosecuted for, at the very least, negligence, as they should be? Of course not. They’ll be protected by the Democrats who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions – all union dues from the same pension abused rank and file – from these same bosses.
Ah, I love the smell of Democrat Party/union corruption in the morning. It smells like quid pro quo.
Cross posted at KimPriestap: No-nonsense conservative opinion
