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:: Sunday, June 22, 2003 ::

The ULLICO scandal - The Washington Times: Editorials
Incorruptible labor legends Samuel Gompers and George Meany must be spinning in their graves. After becoming the first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, Mr. Gompers founded the Union Labor Life Insurance Co. (now the major subsidiary of the ULLICO holding company) in 1925 in order to provide affordable insurance and other financial services to union members. Mr. Meany, who became the first president of the merged AFL-CIO in 1955 and served in that capacity for a quarter-century, worked inexhaustibly to eliminate corruption within the labor movement -- which included expelling the Teamsters from the AFL-CIO in 1957. That same year, the AFL-CIO adopted a rule mandating the expulsion of any union official invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid scrutiny in a corruption case.

Socialist Worker archive: ULLICO spells union corruption "Trade union life insurance, like other forms of trade union capitalism, works injuriously upon the labor organizations," William Z. Foster, a veteran labor and Communist Party leader, wrote of ULLICO shortly after it was founded in 1925. "It diverts their attention from the struggle and into capitalist enterprises. It poisons the organizations with an anti-working class ideology, and subordinates them organizationally to capitalist institutions. It corrupts the leaders, enriches them and makes them less and less responsive to rank-and-file interests and control. It is a menace to the labor movement."

The menace is greater than Foster could have imagined. Holding union leaders accountable over dealings such as ULLICO must be part of the fight for a democratic, fighting labor movement.

posted 8:40 AM :: reference link :: 0 comments ::

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