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BETRAYAL: HOW UNION BOSSES SHAKE DOWN THEIR MEMBERS AND CORRUPT AMERICAN POLITICS
Chavez, Linda
2004 5791 "Linda Chavez and fellow union expert Daniel Gray expose the corrupt bargain between the labor movement and the Democratic Party." Chavez and Gray name names, exposing the many politicians who are in Big Labor's pocket - including the leading lights of the Democratic Patty. Betrayal also reveals: big labor's all-out efforts in the 2004 election, including how just one local union has launched a $35-million campaign to unseat President Bush; how corrupt union officials use members' hard-earned money to fund lavish lifestyles - and how their Democratic supporters let them get away with it; how unions flout the law by failing to report any of their political spending to the IRS; how a government report uncovered the Democrats' sellout to Big Labor - but how the unions and the Democrats sued to keep the report from going public; how the U.S. government lets unions practice legalized terrorism against American citizens; how public-employee unions extort concessions from the government and put Americans at risk by refusing to provide vital services like policing and firefighting; and how Americans now live under a system of legal apartheid - one set of rules for labor bosses, another for the rest of us. America's labor unions pour money into the Democratic Party in pursuit of a "socialist," big government political agenda and have abandoned their mission of collective bargaining, contend Fox pundit Chavez (An Unlikely Conservative) and Gray, a consultant for Stop Union Political Abuse. What makes this worse than corporate bosses funding Republicans, they note, is that labor's pelf comes from the "forced dues" of workers who don't individually consent to union political donations. Chavez, a former union official and Bush labor secretary nominee, and Gray, a former National Right to Work Committee official, make some charges stick. They show that unions do give a lot of money to, and wield a lot of clout with, Democrats, with the usual problems of corruption and favoritism that big money special-interest politics entails. But by the authors' own accounting, unions spend less than 5% of their money on politics-a percentage that, they concede, workers can get refunded from their dues, albeit with some difficulty. And when Chavez and Gray show unions sticking to winning better pay, better benefits and lighter workloads for their members, they damn them for bankrupting companies and driving jobs abroad. At that point, the book's critique of unions' excesses shades into a one-sided attack on their very existence. Crown Publishing Group 1400052599 / 9781400052592
Hardcover As New Condition New York
Price:
24.01 USD
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