Josh Hawley campaigned on right to work. Why is he backing Big Labor now? | Opinion
On May 4, three former top bosses of the Kansas City-based International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union, along with the wife of former IBB President Newton Jones, are set to be tried in a federal court in Kansas for their alleged involvement in a scheme to steal $20 million in workers’ forced-dues money and other union funds.
In August 2024, along with racketeering defendants Jones and his wife, Kateryna, former International Secretary-Treasurer William Creeden, former International Vice President Lawrence McManamon, two other former top IBB officers and a former IBB staff member were indicted. But former President Warren Fairley, former Secretary-Treasurer Kathy Stapp and former union staffer Cullen Jones (Newton’s son) have all since pleaded guilty to racketeering and participation in a systematic embezzlement scheme.
A complaint recently filed with the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards by two forced dues-paying members of Kansas City-based IBB Local 83 formally conveys their strong suspicion that theft and misappropriation of IBB union funds have continued, even in the wake of the indictments and guilty pleas cited above.
In that Feb. 18 filing, Local 83 members Darrell and Jessica Manroe allege that “at least four current members of the (Boilermakers) International Executive Council are reportedly under active federal investigation and face potential indictment, creating a continuing environment of fear, coercion, and retaliation within the union.”
Unfortunately, because of a handful of provisions in federal labor law that authorize and promote the termination of employees for refusal to pay dues or fees to a union as a job condition, the Manroes and most other IBB-represented employees have no choice but to continue bankrolling this corruption-plagued union.
Even if you believe, as the Manroes evidently do, that a majority of the IBB union bosses who are currently collecting ample forced dues-funded salaries and benefits in their capacities as members of the union’s executive council are criminals who, at a minimum, aided and abetted Big Labor racketeering, you have to fork over money for their pay and perks. If you don’t, you will lose your job.
Handful of Republicans with Democrats
As sad as this injustice is, what’s even sadder is that just about every member of the Democratic Party now in Congress is acting as if it’s hunky-dory to deprive employees of the right to work merely for refusal to bankroll union bosses who the workers have good reason to suspect are embezzlers. Sadder still is the fact that a handful of Capitol Hill Republicans concur even though, unlike Democratic politicians, they get almost nothing in return from Big Labor.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is a case in point. He was originally elected to his current office less than eight years ago after returning his National Right to Work Committee Candidate Survey pledging 100% opposition to union special privileges. But Hawley is now an unabashed foe of freedom of individual choice, who opposes existing state right to work laws, as well as national right to work legislation.
But what does Hawley have to say about the fact that accused embezzler Newton Jones continued to head the IBB, headquartered in Hawley’s home state, for more than a decade after the publication of the May 2012 Kansas City Star story documenting in detail how Jones and his relations had collectively bilked the union of more than $1 million in 2011 alone?
As a follow-up article published by The Star later that month acknowledged, a number of rank-and-file boilermakers had contacted the paper, reporting they had questioned Jones’ and other IBB bigwigs’ pay and benefits for a long time, but had never gotten any answers.
Federal policies granting union bosses monopoly-bargaining and forced-dues power over the workers they purportedly represent make Big Labor generally unaccountable to those workers.
Every now and then, a crooked union boss gets caught and goes to prison, but there can be no fundamental change in Big Labor’s culture of corruption as long as the federal authorization for compulsory unionism remains on the books.
Does Josh Hawley really want to protect and even expand the forced-unionism privileges of Big Labor embezzlers? Until he switches back to the pro-right to work stances he affirmed on the campaign trail in 2018, it’s hard to read his position any other way.
Mark Mix is president of the 501(c)(4) nonprofit National Right to Work Committee.