But this is only the tip of the iceberg. These unions also gave millions to so-called 527 organizations, which can collect and spend unlimited amounts trying to elect or defeat candidates. According to its own press releases, the SEIU alone gave $26 million to America Coming Together, an anti-Bush 527, while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave $1 million to the Media Fund to run ads against the president and Republicans. All of this money came from union dues, not from the voluntary contributions unions collect through their Political Action Committees, which spent an additional $52 million in the 2004 election cycle, 86 percent of it going to Democrats.
Some 43 percent of voters in union households voted for President Bush in 2004, according to exit poll data. But these union members have virtually no say in how their unions spend their hard-earned money. Next week's vote among AFL-CIO union leaders won't change that one whit. The president of the SEIU, Andy Stern, claims he wants the AFL-CIO to spend more on organizing new members and brags that his own union spends half its budget on signing up new members, a boast that is impossible to verify given the arcane methods unions use to hide their finances. But the AFL-CIO dissidents are among the worst offenders when it comes to wasting their members' dues on politics. Enforcing union members' right to withhold that portion of their dues that goes to politics would do more to reform the labor movement than any phony bolt from the AFL-CIO.