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The Wall Street Journal reports on what might be the next great federal bailout. The Teamsters Union Central States pension fund has been in trouble for some time—UPS pulled out of the fund in 2009—but now it’s advancing towards a point of no return.

It seems the Teamsters Union’s Central States pension fund is going bust fast, with companies like Republic Services pulling their employees from the fund. The Journal notes:

Investment losses during the financial crisis and hard times for trucking companies that pay into the Teamsters’ Central States Funds have sapped the fund of money it uses to pay promised benefits.

With just 60 cents of assets for every $1 in obligations, the Teamsters pension fund is considered in “critical” status by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal agency that backstops failed pensions.

You read that right: “backstops.” If the Central States fund goes bust, taxpayers could be on the hook. And how deep is the sea of red that drowns the fund’s ledger? The Journal continues:

The pension plan pays about $2.8 billion in benefits a year but takes in only about $700 million in employer contributions. “You have to make up the rest with investment returns,” said Mr. Nyhan, which he thinks is unlikely over the long term.

Companies are trying to preserve their employees’ retirements by trying to reform pensions. Unions want employees trapped in these dying funds.

Huffington Post: Armored Car Drivers Try To Unionize In New York City
Labor wants to make greater inroads into security, a field with traditionally low unionization rates.

Bloomberg: N.Y. MTA Labor Talks Drag as Union Fights Part-Time Bus Drivers
Union officials of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 continue to urge ignorance of reality as unionized drivers continue to raise costs with unnecessary overtime pay.

The Indypendent: Christine Quinn & Labor
Progressives take shots at labor and at New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the current frontrunner to be the next mayor.

Although former speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives Christopher Donovan came up short in his run for Congress, the Hartford Courant reports that he’s being encouraged to campaign to be the next head of the state’s AFL-CIO. Donovan has a great prerequisite: he’s already involved in a serious scandal.

A few months before the Democratic primary, seven people were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy in directing illegal campaign contributions to Donovan. Among those were Donovan’s campaign manager and long-time aide, his finance director, and a union leader. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Prosecutors also disclosed that Ray Soucy, a former union official and a key figure in the probe, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy charges in the scheme, which supplied straw donors with cash so they could write checks to Mr. Donovan’s campaign committee.

In exchange, according to court documents, Mr. Soucy assured the co-conspirators that Mr. Donovan would kill legislation to close a loophole allowing roll-your-own tobacco shops to avoid collecting cigarette taxes. The bill didn’t come up for a vote in the state Legislature.

Since his defeat, not much has been heard from Donovan. And although he has not been accused of wrongdoing, the swirling scandal around him is par for the course for union officials.

In Minnesota, a father-son duo has been accused by the International Teamsters of embezzlement, bank fraud, racketeering, and other financial crimes. Bradley Slawson Sr. and Bradley Slawson Jr. of Local 120 are currently on unpaid leave from the union. The pair is said to have received payments from a Teamsters-owned bar — payments adding up to $140,000 between the two of them. Another teamster, Todd Chester, helped to coordinate those payments from the bar and has also been charged. Chester, described in the Star Tribune as “a family friend of the Slawsons” and “the father of one of Slawson Sr.’s grandchildren,” also received a questionable finder’s fee of $90,000 for the construction of a new union hall. The Star Tribune reported in December that the Independent Review Board (IRB) report included an “unsettling allegation… that one of the bar managers wanted to hold a fundraiser for a ‘nonexistent fake sick baby’ and direct the funds instead to a bar the union owns in Fargo.” The bar, the Teamsters Club in Fargo, North Dakota, hosted a victory party for Democratic now-Senator Heidi Heitkamp.

The Slawsons claim that this is just a “witch hunt” because the family broke away from Jimmy Hoffa Jr. in 2010. But this isn’t the first time the Slawsons have been in the news for misconduct. In 2009, the Department of Labor conducted an audit of Local 120’s records under its Compliance Audit Program (CAP) of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) and found that Slawson Sr.’s chapter committed recordkeeping and reporting violations. In 2000, a press release from Overnite Transportation Co. reveals that Slawson Jr. pled guilty to disorderly conduct charges for his actions at a strike of the company. The release says:

Slawson was found in contempt of court on May 8 for his self-admitted threats and coercion in connection with unrefuted claims that he struck one Overnite driver with a picket sign and locked another Overnite driver in a trailer while the driver was attempting to make a delivery at a customer’s facility. Slawson was ordered to keep away from Over[ni]te property and that of the trucking company’s customers for the purpose of assisting the union in any labor action against Overnite. He was also ordered to pay $500 to compensate Overnite for attorneys’ fees and costs.

Not surprisingly, Junior was also a big fan of EFCA.

Labor should go no further than its own backyard if it is looking to blame anyone for its declining numbers. Rampant crime and corruption are just line-items on the long list of reasons why organized labor slides deeper into irrelevancy.

The members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) walked out of many of Hostess’s 36 bakeries on November 9 in protest of the new contract ordered by a bankruptcy court judge. Hostess filed for bankruptcy in January and has tried for several months to restructure. The deal offered to the BCTGM, similar to the one accepted by Hostess’s largest union, the Teamsters, called for wage and pension reductions that were necessary to keep the company afloat.

Because of the strike, even the Teamsters, who agreed to the new deal, will be out of work. In all, Hostess’s liquidation will affect the remaining 33 bakeries, 565 distribution centers, 570 bakery outlet stores, and roughly 5,500 delivery routes. The assets will be put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder.

The notable supporters of the plan are the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the Big Labor-funded Economic Policy Institute. The report was released at EcPI and included remarks from Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO.

The group Loewentheil founded, The Roosevelt Institute, received a total of $35,000 from the AFL-CIO, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters in July and August of 2011. And the website for the report directs the “Contact Us” email address to Jeff Parcher of the Center for Community Change, another supporter of the plan. The Center and its sister organization, the Campaign for Community Change, received a combined $35,000 from the SEIU National Headquarters and a local chapter, AFL-CIO, and UNITE HERE in 2010-2011.

So how do we get to the promised land? With more unions, of course!

Should you be allowed to sell a stock if it was dropping like a rock?

That’s the question that our executive director contemplates in Forbes. Unfortunately, many Americans can’t do the same with their own poor investment — their labor union.

Rather than supporting efforts such as the Employee Rights Act, unions are busy spending on candidates that a number of their members do not support. Furthermore, union membership is falling as those who have a choice are sending in their “sell” order by not joining the union and not paying its costly dues.

And now, union members have another reason to take stock of their situation and reconsider mailing that next check. Unions are opposing the RAISE Act, which would set the collectively bargained wage as the wage floor, but not the ceiling, in collective bargaining agreements. As the law currently stands, unions have the ability to reject merit raises earned by individual members. Unions say that it undermines the collective bargaining process.

At a subcommittee hearing in the House last week union lawyer Devki Virk, who is on the Board of Directors for an AFL-CIO committee,  testified that the RAISE Act is not fair because workers won’t have a say if they want individual raises. Virk says that it would put the decisions regarding raises in the hands of the employer.

We’ve heard this rhetoric before from both the Teamsters and the SEIU about raises not being “fair” to all employees.

But when you get down to it, the true motivations are clear. As James Sherk notes, it’s because unions know that if employees are in a state where they actually have a choice about being in a union, they’ll understand that it’s a bad investment:

 Collective bargaining presupposes that workers can negotiate higher pay together as a group. That’s why union members will pay hundreds of dollars annually in dues. But if the wage that the union negotiated is $15 per hour and an employee gets a performance-based raise to $20 per hour, then why is he paying union dues?

Unions want exclusive power over their members’ investments, but the ERA and RAISE Act, even with their values rising, aren’t part of the portfolio.

The right-to-work battle is heating up in Indiana, and labor unions look desperate. So desperate in fact, that union leaders are contemplating disrupting the Super Bowl, which will be played in the Lucas Oil Stadium.

The Associated Press reports that around 50 Indiana labor leaders met this week for the AFL-CIO’s “labor Table” to discuss a strategy. With all eyes on Indiana on February 5, Big Labor wants to cash in on the free publicity and use the opportunity to bash right to work efforts in the state. The Teamsters are considering blocking the streets around the NFL village with truckers willing to risk arrest for their cause, and other union members could flood the streets marching in protest.

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said they don’t expect the game to be disrupted, likely because the unions representing stagehands, carpenters, electricians and painters have a no-strike agreement with the board that runs the Indianapolis Convention Center. But other unions key to the overall success of the super bowl, such as hotel employees do not fall under the no-strike agreement.

It is clear from the hostile attitude of one Teamster organizer saying, “You can tell them we’ll take the Super Bowl and shove it,” that the good of the community might not be Big Labor’s number one interest. With Republicans in the state House and Senate hoping to vote on right-to-work legislation in the upcoming weeks, the half-time show might not be the only controversy at this year’s Super Bowl.

The Daily Caller has another fascinating article about an Obama Administration policy that could give unions a membership boost:

By increasing the number of “green” requirements truckers have to comply with in order to get into some major United States ports — like Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland — the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are helping push previously independent truckers into companies, which then makes them vulnerable to unionization or, in many cases, forced to join a union. As these aren’t administrative laws from the EPA per se, trucks that don’t fit this new “green” standard, which is meeting at least 2007 EPA emissions levels, are still allowed to operate throughout the country. But each of the major port authorities won’t let them in if they don’t fit the new environmental regulations, which would force many independent truckers out of business if they resist since many truckers depend on business from the ports to survive.

And sure enough, the Caller goes on to quote a spokeswoman for a coalition of groups (including the Teamsters) saying she wants to stop the “misclassification” of truckers as independent contractors. Far better for distant labor leaders to decide truckers’ employment arrangements rather than truckers and trucking companies.

This is a story to watch for two reasons. First, it’s another example of the government stacking the deck in favor of labor unions, which look increasingly unable to survive without the feds. Second, it shows the continuing efforts by organized labor to co-opt the green movement and use it to gain members. As we’ve noted in the past, the Teamsters have embarked on a protracted effort to eliminate independent truckers — all under the guise of being “environmentally friendly.” Now they’ve enlisted the EPA in their scheme.

Image courtesy of Hugo90.