On February 17, Pamela Williams, former travel/procurement coordinator for Service Employees International Union Local 880, was charged in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois with one count of embezzling $6,080. The amount allegedly taken was modest, but the case has national significance. The Chicago-based SEIU Local 880, now known as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, was founded some 30 years ago as a subsidiary of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, the scandal-plagued nationwide nonprofit network set to go out of existence on April 1. Pamela Williams may be little more than a small-time thief, but she's given critics of the leadership of ACORN, and the SEIU, another reason to believe that organized labor and street radicals shouldn't mix.
Ever so quietly, America passed a milestone in 2009. For the first time in our history the number of employees in the public sector belonging to a labor union exceeded the number in the private sector. Proposed legislation in Congress would push this trend along further. The benignly-named 
It may have been a formality, but the executive board of the Service Employees International Union this past Saturday overwhelmingly named SEIU Executive Vice President Mary Kay Henry to succeed Andrew Stern as the labor organization's next president. The 73-member governing body met in Washington, D.C. to select Ms. Henry, who ran unopposed after Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger dropped out of the race a little over a week earlier. Henry, like Burger, is a Stern loyalist.
The successor to Andrew Stern as president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had come down to his two top aides. Now it's down to one. Late last week, SEIU Secretary-Treasurer 
Barack Obama and organized labor have made no secret about promoting each other's interests. Indeed, his 2008 presidential victory would have been much more difficult in absence of union financial contributions and volunteer work. Thus, 
To many of its critics, the 
"We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama - $60.7 million to be exact - and we're proud of it," Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President 
On November 17, Joseph Morana, former president of National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) Local 01-86, admitted in District Court of Brockton, Massachusetts to a finding of sufficient facts to the charge of larceny. He was ordered to serve up to two years of supervised probation, and to pay $7,696.48 in restitution to the West Roxbury union plus a special assessment of $90. NAGE is an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. Admitting to a "finding of facts" amounts to a guilty plea, though without using the word "guilty." The action follows an investigation by the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is among the many partners that the Obama administration has relied upon in its ongoing effort to socialize the U.S. economy. Indeed, the SEIU has been a special partner. That's because President Andrew Stern has operated as a lobbyist all but in name. A major Washington, D.C. conservative nonprofit organization and a related group are putting the union on alert that this may be illegal. For the second time in less than a month, Americans for Tax Reform and an affiliate, the Alliance for Worker Freedom, have asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether White House visits by a top union official exceeded the allowable threshold for persons not registered as lobbyists. The last time around, the inquiry centered upon Stern. This time around, it is focusing on the union's secretary-treasurer, 
Unions understandably resent competition from non-joining workers. And their members do what they can, legally or not, to discourage it. But a local Pennsylvania affiliate of the Service Employees International Union may have taken things too far in allegedly threatening to sue an Eagle Scout. In the wake of bad publicity, its president has resigned. On Thursday, May 19, 
