Posts tagged House Education and Workforce Committee
The Importance of Protecting Portable Benefits
August 19, 2025 // The modern gig economy employs about 75 million workers. The provision of benefits is, of course, a positive for these freelance workers – so if businesses wish to provide them, they should be able to do so without fear of misclassification lawsuits. In short, Congress should consider these bills as a positive for both the millions of gig workers and the businesses that wish to provide them competitive benefits packages.
Congress Probes Powerful Teachers’ Union Brass Spending Funds On Limo Rides
August 7, 2025 // The House Education and Workforce Committee inquired about public records showing that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) spent more than $100,000 on private limousine services since September 2023 in a Thursday letter to the AFT. Lawmakers have also received reports from unnamed sources that Weingarten, the union’s president, has paid for other conveniences such as a private driver, the letter says.
Michael Watson: Improving Union Annual Reporting
July 3, 2025 // Especially following the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which “collection” is funding what spending is important information for union members, and they deserve ready, single-site access. (Citizens United overturned a Taft-Hartley Act–derived ban on using union dues revenues for independent expenditures on behalf of candidates.) They should not need to cross-reference Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports and Labor Department reports to infer which pot of money paid for which spending. Instead, the Labor Department or Congress should revise the LM-2 form to require labor unions to specify the funding source, perhaps by adding a new schedule for expenditures to or by the “Separate Segregated Fund” (the technical name for the “second collection” pot of money) or by requiring specification of the source of funds for Schedule 16 and 17 expenditures related to politics and advocacy.
Walberg, Allen Seek Feedback on Path to Give Rank-And-File Workers a Bigger Voice in Unions
May 28, 2025 // “Too often, rank‑and‑file workers lack the timely information and meaningful voice they need to hold elected leaders accountable for both fiscal and political decisions. Recent misconduct cases, ranging from embezzlement to unauthorized political expenditures, underscore the need for a modernized framework that prioritizes the rights of individual members to hold union leadership accountable and that provides individual union members with more control over how labor organizations operate.”
Chairman Walberg Investigates DHS Program Abuse for Union Organizing
May 3, 2025 // “The Committee has seen examples of union organizers exploiting the deferred action program contrary to Congress’s intent. In one such example, a national trade union flyer posted online suggests that union organizing is the first step in accessing deferred action. The flyer suggests that a grant of deferred action is a reward, stating that a grant of deferred action is a ‘WIN’ for the employee. The flyer further states at the top in bold capital letters: ‘DEFERRED ACTION = WORK PERMIT FOR 2 YEARS + SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER.’ Instead of protecting immigrant workers from retaliation, outside groups seem to be interested in subverting deferred action to push unionization.”
Chair Walberg Requests Investigation into Alleged Union Embezzlement
April 17, 2025 // “According to the article, Mr. Gresham ‘has for years used union money to benefit himself, his family and political allies.’ These allegations raise serious concerns about whether the union’s officers have been treating the union treasury as a personal slush fund rather than upholding their legal duty to manage members’ dues for the members’ exclusive benefit. The Committee shares these concerns and is committed to supporting the enforcement of federal laws protecting union members’ rights.”
Chairman Walberg Calls on DOL IG to Investigate EBSA’s Power Abuse
January 23, 2025 // “As we saw in the first Trump administration, career bureaucrats have sought to undermine the goals of the President and his cabinet Secretaries. We know of cases where bureaucrats have leaked sensitive information or are working with plaintiffs’ attorneys to skew court cases against employers. The Committee’s oversight work recently brought to light how [EBSA] is abusing its authority to secretly share information with class action law firms. This is a blatant abuse of the law, and our Committee will hold EBSA accountable.”
Report Shows Extent of Tax Dollars Spent on Public-Sector Unionism
January 17, 2025 // The results of the 2024 presidential election were a repudiation of Biden’s “most pro-union administration in American history,” in favor of one that sides with actual workers, as opposed to union bosses. Congress has every right to demand oversight over the expenses of the executive branch, especially when taxpayer dollars are funneled to union bureaucrats that are working in the interests of themselves and not the American people.
Labor Department under GOP fire for hosting ‘union pep rally’ ahead of election
October 1, 2024 // The panel discussion that succeeded the occasion spotlighted “commitments unions have made at the national and local levels to foster a diverse workforce, including pledging to increase the percentage of women in the building trades and establish committees for underrepresented workers to involve them in their local union’s work.” Panelists were from some of the nation’s largest unions, including the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union. SEIU was one of the nine inductees. Foxx stated her committee “has long been concerned about DOL’s lapses in judgment involving holding one-sided events near an election.”
The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Practical Case
August 11, 2024 // The effect of sectoral bargaining on union corruption would be unclear. Scholars of union corruption have blamed enterprise bargaining combined with union monopoly representation for America’s unusually high levels of labor racketeering. There is truth to this, but it is also not the case that American unions involved in industries with more-sectoral-style approaches are “cleaner.” The New York City garment industry, which was exempted from various Taft-Hartley regulations on union conduct, was believed by the federal government to have been Mob influenced as recently as the 1990s. More recently, the United Auto Workers, which conducts a sort of pseudo-sectoral bargaining with the unionized Detroit Three automakers by “patterning” its contracts, was forced into a regime change after the largest union corruption scandal of the 21st century. Putting more power in the hands of America’s long-standing class of union officials, who are known for having their hands in the cookie jar, certainly is not an obvious approach to reducing or surveilling corruption in organized labor.