Posts tagged Securities and Exchange Commission
House GOP panel accuses nation’s largest teachers union of exploiting members’ retirement benefits
September 29, 2025 // Committee Chairman Tim Walberg of Michigan and committee members Rick Allen of Georgia, Kevin Kiley of California and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina shared a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that showed retirement services provider Security Benefit paid the nation’s largest teachers’ union a $4 million annual “base fee” for the exclusive right to sell annuities and mutual funds to teachers in 2023-24. They noted that Department of Labor reports show the NEA receiving more than $61 million in “service level agreement” or “advertising revenue” since 2005, even as the union maintains in its 2024 SEC filing that it received “no dividends, royalties, profit, or licensing fees” from Security Benefit.
Plan Sponsors Get Go-Ahead on Alternatives as DOL Shifts Stance
August 22, 2025 // For plan sponsors, this regulatory shift provides much-needed clarity and removes a significant deterrent that had been hanging over alternative investment discussions. The DOL has essentially returned to a neutral, principles-based approach that allows fiduciaries to evaluate all investment options based on their merits rather than facing special scrutiny for considering alternatives.
Unveiling Financial Transparency Failures in Labor Organizations
July 24, 2025 // In 2024 alone, the DOL recorded 177 union enforcement actions involving fraud, embezzlement, wire fraud, and falsified records. These are only the crimes that rise to the level of federal prosecution. Far more ethical violations, financial misuses, and questionable behaviors fall below the radar leaving union members in the dark and are quietly buried through internal repayments, hush resignations, or legal threats — all without any formal DOL investigation or public accountability. Despite 16 years as a union official, I did not become aware of the existence of LM-2 financial disclosure filings until our local filed a lawsuit against our state affiliate. Imagine that: even as a union president and past treasurer, I was unaware that both our state and national unions were required to submit LM-2 forms to the Department of Labor. If someone like me — deeply engaged in union governance — was kept in the dark, how can we expect average members to know their rights, much less exercise them?
AP Exclusive: US meatpacking workers win back pensions in new union contract with JBS
May 27, 2025 // The United Food and Commercial Workers union said Thursday that 26,000 meatpacking workers at 14 JBS facilities would be eligible for the pension plan. The new contract, which was ratified by workers this week, also adds paid sick leave, wage increases and new plant safety measures.
FRANK RICCI: Fire Fighters’ Union Betraying Its Members
May 13, 2025 // Such dealings include collecting millions from muscular dystrophy charities—funds many members thought were going to sick kids stricken with a debilitating disease. Instead, these yearly collected funds from the “Fill the Boot Campaign” were funneled back from the charity to the union’s coffers. The practice was curtailed only after eliciting member outrage when it was finally exposed. The federal court’s recent ruling to deny the IAFF-FC’s motions to dismiss validates the seriousness of Hughes’ claims, allowing the case to proceed and exposing the union’s alleged misconduct to greater scrutiny.
Commentary: Biden pursues organized labor’s agenda through regulation
March 14, 2024 // The OSHA “walkaround” rule flies in the face of a regulation that stipulates that people who accompany an OSHA inspector must be employed by the company under inspection. Under the proposed rule, OSHA representatives would have to simply state that a union official was “reasonably necessary” to the inspection to bring that individual to the site. The walk-around rule presents an opportunity for union organizers to collect information or otherwise infiltrate nonunion workplaces, a clear attempt by OSHA to give unions a leg up in organizing drives. Another example is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s universal proxy rule, which forces companies to include management and dissident shareholder nominees on a single proxy card in contested elections. The rule enabled a coalition of our nation’s largest and most militant unions to extract new concessions from Starbucks by threatening to mount a hostile takeover attempt of the coffee company’s board. Unions will continue to exploit the universal proxy rule to bring other publicly traded companies to the table with threats of a hostile takeover.
Starbucks proxy war shows Big Labor’s new tactic
February 23, 2024 // Crucially, the new SEC rule allows the SOC to push for huge changes to the Starbucks board with comparatively little skin in the game. Starbucks has a market capitalization of $105 billion. The SOC owns 161 shares of Starbucks, a stake worth approximately $16,000. Thanks to the universal proxy rule, the SOC can use Starbucks’s own proxy materials to promote its hostile takeover attempt without bearing the costs of its own solicitation. The Starbucks proxy fight is one part of SOC’s broader scheme to impose Big Labor’s agenda on every publicly traded American company. The SOC’s coalition includes some of the most militant and disruptive unions in the country: the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, and the United Farmworkers of America. These unions regularly engage in strikes, protests, boycotts, litigation, and other tactics to bend workers and employers alike to their will.
Opinion: Protect workers by preventing union neutrality agreements
February 21, 2024 // A neutrality agreement is a contract between a union and an employer that typically forbids employers from communicating with employees about the unionization effort or the union behind it. This includes not discussing with workers the viability of any promises the union makes, the accuracy of information provided by the union, or details about the union’s record. Employers that sign neutrality agreements are even precluded from answering employees’ basic questions about how the bargaining process works. So in short, these deceptively named neutrality agreements are anything but. Employers are not actually asked to be neutral, but instead to leave employees in the dark about the choice they face.
‘All-of-government’ approach undermines workers’ free choice
February 15, 2024 // As punishment for the “offense” of simply not being organized by a union, these employers face particular hostility from the supposed arbiter of private-sector labor relations, the National Labor Relations Board. Now packed with pro-union Biden appointees, the Board continues to issue decisions that appear singularly focused on increasing union power without regard to their impact on workers or businesses.
Commentary: Is the NLRB Unconstitutional? The Courts May Finally Decide.
December 6, 2023 // While many agencies act politically, the Board is a special problem. Unlike other agencies, the Board makes almost all its decisions not through rulemaking, but through one-off panel decisions. That means it can change policy much faster. The “law” can swing wildly from case to case. In fact, according to one study, the Board during the Obama administration reversed a group of decisions that had been on the books for more than a collective 4,500 years. The Board’s constitutional flaws are also different from those of other agencies. For example, in a recent case involving the SEC, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the agency’s structure violated the Seventh Amendment. That was because the SEC can impose civil fines—the kind of claims that must be tried to a jury. The Board has no authority to impose civil fines, so it doesn’t have the same Seventh Amendment problem. Its problem instead comes instead from its unchecked power to decide cases. It controls the outcome in disputes affecting a range of private rights. And those disputes, according to Article III of the Constitution, should be decided only by real judges.