Six large public unions have funneled tens of millions of dollars, much of which came from taxpayer-funded dues payments, into aiding Democrats in their bid for power this election cycle.
A handful of large public-sector unions pumped well over $60 million into political organizations, with the lion’s share going toward helping Democrats win races at every level of government, according to the latest set of campaign finance disclosures.
The Daily Caller News Foundation included the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in its analysis of campaign finance records. In 2020, these six labor organizations were the top political contributors among unions representing public sector employees, according to OpenSecrets.
Unions are legally prohibited from contributing membership dues directly to federal political campaigns, according to the Department of Labor. They can, however, donate revenue derived from membership dues to super PACs and 501(c)(4) advocacy organizations, both of which often work to elect candidates.
Indeed, some of the committees that received the most money from public sector unions were super PACs aimed at delivering legislative majorities and the White House to Democrats.
The House and Senate Majority PACs, committees working to elect Democrats to the upper and lower chambers of Congress, collectively pulled in about $15 million from public unions, according to campaign finance records. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which play similar roles, brought in just over $1 million from public-sector union PACs. Future Forward, the primary organization focused on delivering the White House to Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, took in $3 million from public unions.
“Obviously, if you have government employees who are working, you are going to pay them,” Capital Research Center research director Michael Watson, an organized labor expert, told the DCNF. “If you then, on top of that, enact collective bargaining, their salaries that were paid for with taxpayer money are going to go to the union which is going to do union stuff, part of which is supporting liberal candidates.”
Watson went on to explain that taxpayers aren’t just seeing their tax dollars going to support partisan Democrats, but that those donations are also leading to officials being elected who then direct more public funds into union coffers.
“The double whammy is that those liberal politicians that the union is sending money to support, if they win, are then going to be negotiating with the unions,” Watson continued.
President Joe Biden, for instance, transferred $36 billion worth of public funds to bolster a union pension pool in December 2022, The Associated Press reported. The Biden-Harris administration is also pushing student loan debt forgiveness, a policy nonpartisan government analysts say could cost the public but is celebrated by public sector unions as a boon for their members.
Watson pointed to Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former union organizer, as a prime example of the taxpayer funds going through the cycle of being used by unions to support liberal politicians who then advocate for more taxpayer funds to flow to unions, thus expanding the amount organized labor can spend on political advocacy to reap even more rewards. Johnson is pushing against much of the city government to take out a $300 million loan to give Chicago teachers, who make an average of $93,000 per year, a 9% raise, The Economist reported.
The mayor’s push for increased teacher pay comes as the city’s public schools faced a half-billion-dollar deficit coming into this school year. The national SIEU and AFT, the second-largest teachers union in the country, collectively gave Johnson over $2.5 million this election cycle, federal campaign finance records show.
Other PACs that raked in considerable funding from public sector unions include pro-abortion committees like EMILY’s List, major liberal committees affiliated with American Bridge and Priorities USA as well as climate-focused organizations, disclosures show. The SEIU, AFT and NALC also put roughly $1.8 million into one of the committees that helped put on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The NALC stood out from the rest of the unions in that, even though most of its political donations went to Democratic-aligned PACs, it made some contributions to right-leaning committees. PACs like the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican Mainstreet Partnership and Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s leadership PAC collectively brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NALC.
“What some unions, I think you’re seeing it more now with the Teamsters under their new leadership with Sean O’Brien and I think with what may be the case with the letter carriers, is that they are behaving more like a traditional special interest group,” Watson told the DCNF. “What the Teamsters under O’Brien and the letter carriers for a long time have been is ‘look, if you cover us on the issues that matter to us … if you’re scratching our back, we’ll scratch yours even if we don’t agree on any other policies.’”
Watson said the letter carriers are likely concerned with federal postal funding.
Of the funds not donated to explicitly Democratic committees, much of them went to other union political committees, which tend to spend primarily on supporting liberal candidates, disclosures show. Labor organizations can also internally spend funds on political activities, which means the full extent of public union political spending isn’t contained in records maintained by the FEC. The SEIU, NEA, AFT and AFSCME, for instance, launched a joint canvassing effort on Oct. 21 aimed at increasing voter turnout in swing states to support the Harris-Walz ticket, according to a press release.
“Every election cycle, union bosses flood the American political system with billions of dollars to push forward a radical political agenda that boosts union officials’ power over workers, and is directly contrary to the priorities and interests of millions of the members union bosses claim to ‘represent,’” National Right to Work Committee president Mark Mix told the DCNF. “This corrupt cycle of forced dues-funded political influence is especially egregious when it comes to government union bosses, who siphon dues out of taxpayer-funded salaries and use the money to elect politicians who are more loyal to their union backers than the voters they are supposed to represent. This doesn’t just harm taxpayers and voters who see bloated budgets and unaccountable elected officials, but also undermines the individual rights of government employees who are forced to accept unions’ monopoly ‘representation’ despite deep personal or ideological objections to union boss-advocated positions.”
The SEIU, NEA, AFT, AFGE, AFSCME and NALC did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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