The Bush administration is pressuring unions to keep them from using the clout of their pension funds against President Bush’s call for privatizing part of Social Security.
This is from an Associated Press story:
The Labor Department cautioned organized labor in a letter made public Wednesday not to use money from pension funds to lobby against President Bush’s proposal to overhaul Social Security.
“The department is very concerned about the potential use of plan assets to promote particular policy positions,” Alan D. Lebowitz, a department official, wrote AFL-CIO’s top lawyer.
In the letter to Jonathan P. Hiatt, AFL-CIO’s general counsel, Lebowitz also wrote that officials charged with administering multistate pension funds must not hire or fire service providers primarily on the basis of their positions on Social Security legislation.
The story goes on to quote a union attorney as being incredibly agreeable about the pressuring. He did say the pension funds should be able to educate plan participants about matters affecting their financial security in retirement.
Maybe we’re missing something here. We fail to see how it’s any of the federal government’s business if the AFL-CIO pension funds close their account with, say, the Synemup & Fleesem Mutual Funds Co. after learning S&F has chipped in $250,000 to a lobbying effort supporting Bush’s cockamamie idea. The union’s pension plan ought to be able to put its money wherever it wishes.
The AFL-CIO and all its component organizations are responsible, first and foremost, to the membership, not to Bush and not to the government. If the union finds a company its doing business with is acting against the interests of its membership, it has every right to sever relations with that business. It also has a perfect right to make known the reason for that action to the members, who may individually decide they don’t want anything to do with the offending business as well.
This is one more case of Bush and the bully types he’s stocked his administration with throwing their weight around. The whole sorry lot of them would be wise to review the history of Richard Nixon’s second term.
We notice the AP writer compliantly refers to what Bush wants as “personal accounts” instead of the obviously more-accurate “private accounts.” Further evidence of liberal media bias — not.
It sounds as if the AFL-CIO attorney is almost as eager to please, which is really hard to understand.
The union lawyer probably thinks Bush will get his judges
and so why pick a fight if youre going to lose in court
anyway.
Grabit, I didn’t mean to suggest the AFL-CIO should pull a bunch of money out of its pension accounts to pay for a PR campaign against Bush’s plan.
What I’m talking about is the union withdrawing retirement investment accounts from financial outfits it perceives as acting against the best interest of the members. The union might also decline to hold stocks or other instruments from companies it perceives as acting against the interests of its members.
What actions by financial outfits and other companies might the union find so objectionable? Funding PR campaigns pushing Bush’s private-accounts scheme to undermine Social Security, among other things.
I don’t see anything unfair or unreasonable about that.
The government lawyer’s letter to the union says, “must not hire or fire service providers primarily on the basis of their positions on Social Security legislation.”
Sorry, but prohibiting that is inimical to the very reason for the union’s existence. If that in fact is the law, it should be fought in court and lobbied against in Congress, to get the law changed.
I can’t imagine the federal government forbidding, say, an association of safety professionals from withdrawing its money from a mutual fund it discovers is invested heavily in firearms manufacturers and breweries.
In any case, welcome to Oh!pinion and thanks for commenting.