Last week, the White House released a list of the 15 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For the most part, the list is a who's who of great Americans -- with everyone from civil rights leader John Lewis to baseball legend Stan Musial.
Then there's John Sweeney, the former president of both the Service Employees International Union and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. According to the White House, Sweeney has been selected to receive the nation's highest civilian honor because "he revitalized the American labor movement, emphasizing union organizing and social justice, and was a powerful advocate for America's workers."
Of course, the claim that Sweeney revitalized the organized labor in any meaningful way is dubious. As recently as 1956, organized labor was 38 percent of the work force. Today it's 7 percent and declining.
The real reason Sweeney is being given this award seems pretty transparent. In 2008, when Sweeney was still head of the AFL-CIO, the union spent more than $53 million helping elect Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Under Sweeney's leadership of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009, the union began spending previously unthinkable sums on politics. And it kept spending money even past the point when the union no longer had it to give it away to Democrats.
From July 1, 2000, to June 30, 2008, the AFL-CIO went from a $66 million surplus to being $2.3 million in debt. Sweeney was president the whole time, including a disastrous episode for the AFL-CIO in 2005 when seven major unions, representing 3.6 million workers, left the AFL-CIO to form the Change to Win coalition.
Among their top reasons for departing? The AFL-CIO was spending too much money on politics and not enough on organizing. The departure of the Change to Win coalition cost the AFL-CIO an estimated $13.9 million a year in union dues, but still Sweeney did not reduce spending on politics. (And the SEIU, which led the Change to Win coalition, would prove to be hypocritical on this point -- spending some $80 million on elections in 2008 and sinking significantly into debt itself.)
After blowing lots of money on elections, AFL-CIO's fiscal future is bleak. Several of the largest unions that make up the AFL-CIO -- such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Union of Operating Engineers and the International Association of Machinists -- have underfunded pension plans. The debts could run into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
To that end, the AFL-CIO and other politically connected unions have been agitating for a legislative solution to their pension woes. They want a "card check" bill so they can bully workers into organizing without a secret ballot; they want to pass a pension plan bailout bill that's being offered by Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa.; and the AFL-CIO is even promoting a plan to go after your 401(k) plan so it can form a national retirement system. That way all taxpayers, not just union members, will subsidize union retirements.
But with pension shortfalls looming and a new Republican Congress, none of these legislative and taxpayer bailouts seems likely to happen. Things for the AFL-CIO are probably going to get a lot worse, and Sweeney will be largely to blame.
After Obama's trip to Stockholm last year to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, the president can't really claim to be above handing out undeserving honors. But by any measure, Sweeney's leadership of the labor movement has been disastrous for American workers. Obama may have 53 million reasons to give Sweeney the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but not one of them is legitimate.
. He can be reached at mhemingway@washingtonexaminer.com.
