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Obama Reduces Union Transparency

By Philip Klein on 4.27.09 @ 10:09AM

The Obama administration has finally found an area in which it is for less regulation -- not surprisingly, it involves monitoring big labor. One of the quiet successes in the Bush administration was Elaine Chao's leadership of the Department of Labor, because she recognized that the function of the agency was to police abuses by unions as well as businesses. Under Chao's leadership, the Office of Labor Management Standards helped uncover fraud by union officials, leading to 1,004 indictments with 929 convictions, and recovering more than $93 million on behalf of union members. Now, Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis -- who as I have documented elsewhere is in the pocket of big labor -- has decided to roll back disclosure requirements of unions, increasing the likelyhood that they'll be able to defraud their members. So much for Obama's new era of transparency.