-Yeah, e.g., the Teamster's Southeastern, etc. States -Pension und was run by the mob and financed its -expansion into Vegas. (See, e.g., Nicholas Pilaggi's -Casino, the basis of a not-bad DeNiro/Psci/Sharon -Stone movie of the same name).
And gave the unions the influence to demand that the hotel casinos recognize the unions in Las Vegas, one of the reasons right-to-work Nevada had one of the most unionized core industries in the country.
Why shouldn't workers want to control their own capital and financial resources? Right now state Medicaid funds are often used to hire striker replacements when nurses go out on strike.
People talk about corruption of union control of pension funds but they don't talk about the power they give unions in many organizing situations. Taft-Hartley began that attack on union control of benefit funds not because of supposed corruption but because they wanted to undercut John Lewis's economic and political power he was beginning to exercise through control of pension and health funds.
My god-- of course someone like Fitch can fill a book with corruption stories. He can also do the same and far more with stories of government corruption. And more books on corporate corruption when they control large sums of money. So what? Money means there will be corruption, but the question is whether unions have any more than parallel institutions. I've never seen any compelling evidence that they do.
In fact, despite all the scandals of the go-go stock market in the 1990s, when the dust settled, almost no union pension funds had any serious problems. The Ullico "scandal" was the biggest one they came up with, but the money involved was pretty damn small and was pocket change compared to serious government and corporate scandals.
You can make union corruption sound bad by long lists of stories but add up the dollars and unions look clean and honest compared to comparable corporate and government officials.
Nathan Newman