Are government employee unions any less of a leech on society than corporations?
The malcontents with the California Federation of Teachers apparently think so. As a part of the recent public school “Day of Action” – a milder, more geriatric version of the 1960s “Days of Rage” – unionists in San Francisco staged a shouting protest in front of the Westfield Mall. The chanters demanded the corporations headquartered inside the mall “pay their fair share.”
Watch the video here.
The hypocrisy comes with the fact that they want others to pay more taxes, while they themselves pay so little.
The CFT’s 2013 LM-2 financial report reveals the union received $21,866,549 in “total receipts.” That type of annual revenue is probably on par with a lot of big corporations. And the union certainly acts like a corporation in the manner in which it compensates top employees:
- ·Jeffery Freitas, Secretary-Treasurer - $166,664
- ·Daniel Martin, Executive Director - $150,557
- ·Kenneth Burt, Political Director - $140,102
- ·Fred Glass, Communications Director - $139,456
Yet the union only paid $371,150 in “direct taxes.” Labor unions are categorized as non-profits by IRS rules and therefore are immune from income taxes.
So these numbers reveal the union paid 1.7 percent of its income in “direct taxes.” Does that qualify as its “fair share?”
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Us poor folks who comprise the 99 percent would like to know why this super wealthy organization, which wields as much political clout as most private companies, is allowed to skate away without contributing a “fair” amount to the high cost of government, particularly when it constantly lobbies on behalf of expensive and wasteful social programs.
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