Mark Hemingway: Union chief doesn’t deserve a presidential medal
Mark Hemingway | Examiner.com
November 21, 2010
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 whos who of great Americans — with everyone from civil rights leader John Lewis to baseball legend Stan Musial.
Then theres 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 nations highest civilian honor because “he revitalized the American labor movement, emphasizing union organizing and social justice, and was a powerful advocate for Americas 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 its 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 Sweeneys 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.
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