Researching your union’s finances
I received an email from a UFCW member in another state. This member asked the following question:
I checked out your blog site and think it’s cool that you are helping labor activists research wages for execs of the companies they work for or negotiate with. I haven’t done Kroger yet but I will. Also, is there a way to find out how much UFCW leaders make? I would like to know how much my Prez makes. I’m beginning to agitate around contract issues and that info could help me apply pressure against his overly complacent and conservative attitude towards the membership.
Let me be very clear from the start: this information is being posted in an effort to uphold the basic union principle that no union president should make more than the highest paid member. You will often hear management criticize a union because the union bosses are making fat cat salaries. My critique and the critique of management are coming for two different places. Whenever I research a union leader’s salary I do so with the belief that every dollar paid to a president that’s above the pay of the highest paid member, is a dollar that should be going into the strike fund.
The strike is a union’s ultimate weapon not the stupid fat cat salaries of union bureaucrats. duh.
This is a very simple question to answer but I’ll take you through all the steps just in case someone is new to this.
You’ll find the salaries of your union’s leadership in the Department of Labor’s LM-2 Forms. If you know the name and local number of your union, you can jump ahead to step 2 below.
Step 1: Get the name of the union that represents you. I only write this cuz I’ve come across workers who have told me they’re members of the AFL-CIO (or now also Change to Win). While this is correct on some level, you’re really a member of a union like: the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the Communication Workers of America (CWA), etc., etc., etc, etc, etc. You can find the name of your union (and its local number) on: the mail sent to you by your union, your contract, at the union hall, etc. Shouldn’t be a big mystery.
Step 2: click on this link. What you’re looking at is the Department of Labor’s page to search for your union’s LM-2 Forms. LM-2′s are the forms a union submits to the government which report the salaries of its leadership and staff (along with: other expenses, membership counts, different amounts of dues payments, etc).
Step 4: click on the drop down menu to the right of where it says “Union Name” (the blue bar in the middle of the page).
Step 5: Pick the name of the union you’re looking for.
Step 6. From that point on, my advice is to pick the name of the state in which you live from the drop down menu. This broadens and narrows your search to a nice, healthy size.
Click “Submit”.
Step 7: The page after that should allow you to pick the exact union you’re looking for. Click on it.
Step 8: Click on the year you’d like to see the LM-2 forms for under where it says “Fiscal Year”.
Step 9: At this point you should be in the LM-2 Form. If you’re looking for someone’s salary you’ll find it in either Schedule 11 or Schedule 12 so scroll down until you see that.
That’s the salaries of everyone who is being paid by the union.
More info:
Schedule 13 gives us the membership count.
Schedule 14 is a list of the union’s larger expenses.
Schedule 16 is political spending.
etc., etc., etc.
In short: this report shows how your union dues are being spent.
-Ric Urrutia
December 31, 2009 at 10:18 pm
[...] Union Staff For Union Democracy « Researching your union’s finances [...]
February 14, 2010 at 5:31 pm
I’ve prepared the financials for a small union local and from what I’ve seen, the problem with bloated cash flow isn’t at the local level. Of the dues paid by members, fully half of it goes to affiliated regional and national union organizations up the chain. I’m guessing that there is increasingly little control by individual members over who takes power at those higher levels, and over who benefits the most financially from their hard-earned dues.
I think it has to do with the power structure itself. I’ve noticed that wherever money and power gravitate (whether it’s in the union, the corporation, Congress, or any other organization), there’s a tendency of those powers to find ways to amass more riches for themselves. They protect each other at the higher levels of power to keep this crooked system in place. Boards of directors (and their equivalent) hang with each other and enable/promote the thieving.
At some level, union bosses get pretty comfortable in their own jobs and don’t have to feel the strife and hardship of the people they’re supposed to represent. I saw this firsthand on a local union level when I worked for a state agency. They routinely ignored issues they should have gone to bat for us on (like workplace health and safety), and seemed more comfortable cavorting with the people they were supposed to be confronting. They fancied themselves as advocates only for more professional licensed staff (e.g., nurses), rather than us lowly government planners.
I don’t know what the answer is, but the problem clearly has to do with the interaction of human nature and power. I think it’s also a product of our more remote interaction between employees and employers. The bigger a company is, the less likely it is that the big bosses even KNOW any of the employees, let alone care about their welfare.
February 20, 2010 at 3:20 pm
[...] would choose to use such inflammatory rhetoric while corresponding with a blogger that’s showing readers how to look up his salary is beyond [...]