dirty laundry” in public for fear of providing ammunition to antiunion employers and damaging public support for the labor movement.[1]
With high costs to information disclosers and users, and few intermediaries available to lower user costs, it is not surprising that the scope, accuracy, and use of this disclosure system did not improve much in forty years. The only significant expansion in scope occurred with the passage of legislation that created similar access to union financial information for federal government workers and the addition of reporting requirements for financial institutions that made loans to unions.[2]
Accuracy or timeliness of the disclosed information improved little. The financial categories and definitions remained the same, as did the level of required financial detail.[3] And despite strong enforcement provisions, the annual delinquency rate in filing reports was 25 percent, the GAO found in 2000. The likelihood of a recordkeeping inspection was small, and most penalties were directed toward unions that intentionally failed to file or that falsified reports.[4]
Overall use of information by rank-and-file union members remained minimal. Contrary to Congress’s expectation that information would be used by union members, most users over the past three decades have been business groups, antiunion consultants, or academics.[5] In 1999, a typical year prior to the creation of Internet-based access, the Labor Department responded to only eight thousand disclosure requests from all sources (out of 13 million union members who were covered by the transparency policy).
The costs of disclosing and particularly of using information, however, fell substantially when Congress appropriated funds in fiscal years 1998 and 1999 to develop and implement electronic filing and dissemination of reports. Over the following three years, the Labor Department developed systems for both filing and accessing disclosure forms via the Internet.[6] As of 2006, unions could file forms electronically, and users could view and print all union financial reports from the year 2000 to the present, search records by a variety of criteria, and request copies from earlier periods via the Department of Labor’s Internet Public Disclosure Room (http://www.union-reports.dol.gov).
The most significant changes to union financial reporting requirements since 1959 came with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. From 2001 to 2006 the Bush administration dramatically increased funding to the Labor Department office that administers the disclosure system (while reducing budgets in much of the rest of the Labor Department), expanding the number of full-time equivalent staff from 290 in FY 2001 to 384 in its proposed FY 2006 budget, and raising overall funding from $30.5 million in FY 2001 to $48.8 million in its proposed FY 2006 budget.[7] The administration cited improving the accuracy and timeliness of union reporting as one of the strategic priorities for this division.
More important, the Bush administration used its authority to issue regulations to alter a variety of reporting requirements.[8] These included expanding reporting for smaller labor unions; requiring electronic filing; and changing the way that financial information is provided by, for example, requiring that unions disclose information on all services purchased for five thousand dollars or more.[9] The new regulations also required reporting of financial information on a programmatic—as well as a line-item—basis (e.g., providing information on the amount of money spent for representation, organizing, and other major union activities).[10] Individual unions and the AFL-CIO opposed many of these changes, arguing that they would substantially increase the costs faced by labor
