Local 983 of District Council 37, American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) AFL-CIO, pays its president, Mark Rosenthal, over $156,000 per year, according to the New York Post. It seems like members might not receive much work for all that dues money. The Post alleges:

The 400-pound president of Local 983 of District Council 37 — the city’s largest blue-collar municipal-workers union — often downs a huge meal, then drops into dreamland in the early afternoon, members of the union’s executive board told The Post.

That’s him snoozing in the accompanying picture, and the Post has several more candid photos of Rosenthal’s cat-naps. (He called them “Power Naps.”) The big boss is so obese that he reportedly broke a chair at McDonald’s by sitting down.

That hasn’t stopped him from racking up $1400 per month in food bills on the union’s treasury, according to other union officials. Union officials have also alleged that he overpaid the union’s attorney. Now Rosenthal is suing the union’s board to reinstate the now-fired attorney he allegedly overpaid.

The irony in this titanic showdown over potential self-dealing and cronyism? When Rosenthal was elected in 1998, he ran as a reformer. Without real structural reform to union governance, the trappings of power and forced dues money may continue to corrupt absolutely.

According to the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of private-sector employees in unions has tumbled to a 70-year low. Only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers were union members in 2012.

Unions’ failure to represent their members’ interests and overzealous defense of unsustainable benefits has hamstrung the airline, manufacturing, and automotive industries, and their numbers are showing the effects of this poor leadership. The most recent prominent victims of union stubbornness were Hostess employees sent to the unemployment line by a Bakers’ Union (BCTGM) strike.

And many former union members are wiser than the declining unions. The Associated Press reports:

Don McGough lost his job as a union steelworker. He found a new position and a decade later, he voted no when the machinists’ union tried to organize workers at his company, JWF Industries, in Pennsylvania. “There are so many companies that just closed their doors because the union wouldn’t budge,” he says.

Unions hope that by expanding organizing efforts to new industries, they can reverse their decline.

While unions representing U.S. manufacturing might — auto and steel — have become smaller, the emphasis in recruiting new members has shifted to the service sector.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents nurses and lower-wage service employees including janitors, security, hospital, home health and child care workers, has doubled in size since 1996, to 2.1 million workers. It says it has added 50,000 workers annually in the last decade.

But unless unions change their ways, such moves might only lead the new industries to follow the traditional unionized industries into bankruptcy court. Instead of clinging to the same old adversarial model on new turf, they should endorse the accountability reform proposals endorsed by 80 percent of union households contained in the Employee Rights Act. Only by reforming themselves and acting in the interests of their members can unions reassert their relevancy.

Organized labor’s newest tactics — recently endorsed by the AFL-CIO — are so-called “New Models of Worker Representation” outside the framework of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA). Both those laws place restrictions on labor unions to ensure that they actually have majority support of the workers they represent and to ensure they use their money for the workers’ desired purposes.

New organizing groups, like “Workers’ Centers,” have no such restrictions. But even union-like groups outside the rules of unions must follow all the other laws in society, as OUR Walmart, a group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), may soon find out in a Florida state case. As Reuters reports:

Wal-Mart alleged that the defendants violated Florida law through coordinated, statewide acts of trespass in several Walmart stores over the last eight months. It has asked the court for a legal ruling that would prevent future trespassing.

In the lawsuit Wal-Mart cited an example where a group of protesters projected a video promoting OUR Walmart on the side of a store in Orlando and passing out literature inside that store in July, 2012.

So far, Wal-Mart employees haven’t shown that they want a union. So “new organizing groups” — actually union sock-puppets — are engaging in “strikes” that may violate state laws, even if they skirt federal union governance rules. Now the unions may find themselves in hot water. Looks like “New Labor” is a lot like the “Old Labor” with its disregard for the law and employee freedom.

Wall Street Journal: Business, Labor Groups Find Little Accord on Immigration
The agreement involves “guiding principles” that both sides have agreed to, but is not the comprehensive plan that was hoped for.

Anchorage Daily News:  Labor lawyers try to rip apart mayor’s proposal to rein in unions
Labor speaks out against the Anchorage proposal that would reform benefits and pensions.

Washington Times: Editorial: Disorganized Labor
The editors explain why it’s wrong to allow violent union activists to have exemptions from criminal laws.

New York Times: Hunter Defends His Union Record
Billy Hunter of the NBA players union speaks out for the first time since an investigation exposed nepotism and other unsavory practices.

NewsWorks: Union: Nutter threatens public employees statewide
“He’s gone full Scott Walker on public-sector workers,” says Herman “Pete” Matthews of District Council 33.

New York Times: Business and Labor Unite to Try to Alter Immigration Laws
Steven Greenhouse provides some details on the negotiations and proposals on a potential guest worker program.

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.

As members of Congress, state legislatures, and the President of the United States are sworn into office, we’re reminded of our American democratic ideals. Unfortunately, many union members don’t get the chance to celebrate democracy thanks to a unionization procedure known as “card check.”

Take Karen Cox and her coworkers at Americold Logistics, who are only the latest examples of how unions intend to end the secret ballot in labor organizing. In spring of 2012, she was given a card that she was told would be used for information purposes. She filled it out and returned it. But in June, she learned that she, along with at least 50 percent of her fellow coworkers, had signed and returned the cards that recognized a labor union.

Cox, who opposed the union, tried to collect petitions from co-workers to call for a secret ballot vote. But rather than let her have the same access rights as union organizers, Cox was stopped from doing so by Americold. She’s now being represented by National Right to Work Foundation in a complaint against the company filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

“I think they did it that way as a way for the union to sneak in without opposition,” Cox told Sauk Valley Media. “Some people were mad about that, and all I want is a legit election.”

In 2011, Barbara Ivey shared her very similar story. A 21-year employee at Kaiser Permanente in Oregon, she was shocked that after only 13 days, a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) card check campaign successfully turned her workplace into a union shop. Ivey said that her coworkers felt pressure to sign the card.

Ivey began to collect signatures for a decertification election, which would allow the employees to vote on the unionization by secret ballot. Although these elections used to take place immediately after a card-check drive, a “safety valve” provision to ensure the card check collection was proper, the NLRB’s penchant for overturning precedent ended that protection. In Lamons Gasket, the NLRB did away with the immediate vote petition and instead required that more time elapse before the decertification vote could take place.

These women aren’t outliers. In fact, denying the secret ballot vote is policy for labor. That didn’t die with the EFCA. With UNITE HERE leading the way, several labor groups, notably the AFL-CIO, backed a boycott of Hyatt Hotels in July because the company refused to allow card check unionization at its hotels.

Just prior to the November election, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO told the Atlantic that labor will never give up on card check. “That’s within the next term,” he claimed.

Card check is no way to determine if an individual really wants to join a union. The process is fraught with potential problems—deception and intimidation chief among them, as shown in the workplaces of Cox and Ivey. Card check makes the vote public and puts employees in the difficult position of openly stating their position to a union organizer. The Employee Rights Act requires secret ballot elections for union certification votes in order to ensure that each individual employee can decide whether she wants to join a union without someone looking over her shoulder.