Useless Unions

Campus Report ^ | September 21, 2009 | Sarah Carlsruh

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Useless Unions

by: Sarah Carlsruh, September 21, 2009

According to a recent ad campaign sponsored by American Rights at Work, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is all about “letting workers choose to join a union to earn better pay and benefits.” Yet Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Andrew Brown of the Hudson Institute disagree, referring to the “sorry state of unions” as a reason the organizations are embracing EFCA, which is currently pending in Congress.

Their September 2009 study, Comparing Union-Sponsored and Private Pension Plans: How Safe Are Workers’ Retirements? states that “many of the major national unions advertise that union members are more likely to have better retirement plans, explicitly defined-benefit retirement plans, than workers without a union.” Yet Furchtgott-Roth and Brown pointed out that “this promise would be far less persuasive were potential union members to understand that a pension is not guaranteed just because it has been created.”

Though unions promise grand benefits for members, the study found that many do not have sufficient provisions to fund those retirement benefits. 2006 data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that non-union plans had funding covered for 97% of liabilities for large union plans, while collectively-bargained plans had only 86% covered.

In addition to poor performance, the study found two major problems with union plans that hinted of corruption: better-performing staff and officer plans and shady political spending.

In comparing rank-and-file union plans to those of the staff and officers, the study found that staff and officers usually do not have collectively-bargained plans; rather their plans are “dictated by the union’s bylaws.” ...

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The Government today does everything the unions started out to do for workers. They only exist now as organs of the Communist Party.