DOL Rulemaking

by | Aug 12, 2010 | Labor Relations Ink

This week the Department of Labor issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on the form LM-30, the form unions file to report receipts from employers and disbursements to outside entities, as required by the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA). These disclosures are intended to provide information to union members and the general public that can help them identify conflicts of interest. Currently the LM-30 rules are inadequate. While they were tightened in July of 2007, there were still a number of areas where large expenditures would go unreported (or could be lumped together without specific reporting). Not to mention the countless cases where union leaders simply don’t report the expenditures at all – but that’s a completely different problem altogether. With these problems one would think the Labor Department would want to tighten up the disclosure requirements even further. After all, these rules are meant to make the forms helpful to union members and to shed light on the expenditures and receipts of these unions so that members can make educated decisions about how their fiduciaries are doing. Yeah, right. Instead, the Department has decided that the changes in 2007 are simply too onerous for unions to deal with. They want to “simplify the form” and “narrow the scope of reporting” so they can reduce the “associated reporting burdens” on unions. Interestingly they didn’t mention anything about making the forms easier for union members to access or read. But instead they propose making it easier for unions to hide money paid to:

  • union shop stewards;
  • union officials who conduct union business “on the clock”;
  • loans to union officials;
  • union officials from other labor unions and affiliated organizations.

My personal favorite is they want to comment on whether high-level union officials must report payments from employers that employ members of lower level unions, or businesses that sell to lower level unions. In other words, just make sure the bribes come in to the subsidiary unions (or to ACORN) and then funnel them up. Brilliant. It is interesting how concerned the DOL is about the reporting burdens on unions on the LM-30 forms while that wasn’t even considered in the stakeholder meetings on Consultant and Attorney reporting for the LM-10 and LM-20 and LM-21 forms. In case there was any question about who is setting the agenda at DOL (there wasn’t…) this should help clear that up. Too bad the union members themselves aren’t part of that agenda.

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