Do unions put members or Labour first?
August 23rd, 2011 at 3:00 pm by David FarrarI’ve actually recruited people to join a union in the past, and believe some unions do a good job of advocating for their members. There are some bad employers out there, and sometimes a collective approach is desirable in dealing with them.
But a real issue I have with many unions, is that they are literally part of the Labour Party, and put the interests of the political party ahead of the interest of their own members. A situation in Australia is a prefect example of this.
A federal Labor MP, Craig Thomson, is under huge scrutiny as when he was the head of the Health Services Union he spent around $150,000 on his union credit card including several prostitutes. He sued Fairfax a couple of years ago who reported this, but has now dropped the lawsuit, but Fairfax has all the documents under discovery.
There is no doubt he stole money off the union, and used their funds for his personal expenses. He denies he hired prostitutes and say someone else signed the chits.However the escort agencies were also rung from his cellphone and handwriting experts say the signatures are his.
There’s a more detailed post on this from someone in Australia tomorrow, but I want to focus today on the issue of why has he not been charged? Well simply because the Police say they can’t investigate unless the union complains.
So why has the union not complained? Wouldn’t any other organisation that had someone do this, complain?
The answer is because he is a Federal Labor MP, and if they complained, then he might be found guilty and might have to resign his seat which would cause a by-election. And if Labor lost the by-election, they may lose Government.
So to protect their mates in Labor, the union won’t complain to the Police. Never mind the fact $150,000 of their members fees were spent by this Labor MP. They put protecting Labor above their own members interests.
Related posts:
- Labor v union
- Unions gain vote on Labour leader
- Labour giving members the vote
- Labour not directed by unions – yeah right
August 23rd, 2011 at 3:05 pm
I’ll complain. Does that help?
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Can’t you smell it?
Its the stink of corruption.
Coupled with the stench of hypocrisy.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:10 pm
“They put protecting Labor above their own members interests”
Vote:Thomson is only guilty of looking after his member’s interests!
August 23rd, 2011 at 3:12 pm
I wouldn’t mind seeing how Unite spent their employees’ PAYE.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:12 pm
150K .. THAT’S A SIMILAR AMOUNT THAT uNITE OWE THE gOVT. i WONDER WHAT THAT WAS SPENT ON
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:13 pm
bugger .. mikenmild beat me to it
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Screwing the workers.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:19 pm
What a tricky position. Probably about as tricky as convincing a UNITE member to complain about the behaviour of Matt McCarten.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:32 pm
$150,000?? Thats a helluva lot of OPM in anyones book…regardless of what he spent it on….
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Power is a virtue while integrity is a vice.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:44 pm
The argument seems to be that because there is corruption in unions in Australia, we should be suspicious about unions in New Zealand. So what? Why limit this to unions? Shouldn’t we also be suspicious about our business leaders, policitians and police? There are plenty of examples of corruption in those areas overseas. Why don’t they also apply to New Zealand?
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Example# 2487 of Unions corruption. Why are we surprised. Look at any organisation involving Socialists. People who just love spending other peoples money.
They get off on it. Look at the Socialist MPs. Noses in the trough looking for every last cent they can screw out of the system. Union officals driving around in flash new cars paid for by the sweat and toil of the workers subscriptions.
And no this is not a piss take I mean every word of it
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 3:56 pm
The NSW Labor party also paid his legal bills and provided other funds to the value of 90K to this guy to ” stop him being declared bankrupt” which would have forced him to resign from parliament and thus force a by-election and likely bring down the “Gillard-Green + Mat Hatter + a few others” government.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Police have announced today they will investigate.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/nsw-police-to-investigate-craig-thomson-in-union-credit-card-case/story-fn7x8me2-1226120401755
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 4:01 pm
My understanding is that the Police will only investigate if there is a complaint from the HSU. The head of the HSU is Michael Williamson. Williamson is also vice president of the NSW Labor Party and a former national president of the Labor Party. Williamson’s daughter is a Gillard staffer. I’ve seen hillbilly families with less interbreeding.
Here is the HSU in action a couple of years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWsVJcUrRC8 The head, Pauline Fegan, had problems with multi-hundred-thousand dollar union contracts awarded to her husband without competitive tender. She also froze the union’s payroll one month as her part in some internal union political squabble. McCarten might not pay his employees’ taxes, but the HSU don’t pay their employees full stop.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Seems to me that Unions are only occasionally a force for good. Most of the time they are holding back employment. Better to be in a union than in a job would seem to be the refrain. So, the story from Aus does not surprise me at all.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Oh, and did anyone pick up that Thomson is actually NZ born? Barring an accident of parental emmigration, he might have been mentioned alongside Cunliffe, Parker, and Jones as a potential Goff replacement. We dodged a bullet here!
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 4:23 pm
@ David Garrett; it’s not as much as the in excess of $250,000 which Matt McCarten withheld from the IRD for eighteen months either side of the 2008 General Election. The Unite Union component (around ($130k) is being repaid on a monthly basis, but a similar amount was withheld by Unite Social Services Limited, a company of which Matt McCarten was the sole director. That company has been put into receivership by IRD on their petition.
Perhaps I’m being cynical with regard to McCarten, but the timing is telling to me. I reckon that McCarten put more stock in political campaigning on behalf of his union than he did on meeting his obligations to IRD; in particular, those obligations on behalf of the employees whose PAYE/Student Loan/Kiwiwsaver deductions he spent elsewhere. He has no mandate to comment on bad employers ever again.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Everything you need to know about Unions can be found within chapter five of Hubert Selby’s novel: Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Read it and weep.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:00 pm
I still recall the Sunday (or 60 Min or whatever) item on the unions when they were trying to introduce computerised systems.
They took the TV cameras into the union meeting. In front of the cameras, men stood up and stated bluntly that the union should be terrorising the bosses in their own homes. No one objected.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:03 pm
A member of the Union could complain after all it was membership funds that were misused. No doubt Tony Abbott is working on this right now.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Part of the 150k is 40k that it seems Thomson spent on his election campaign.
He was also given 90k by the NSW ALP to stop bankruptcy proceedings against him. Smelly in the extreme.
As per – the cover up is where the trouble really started. Thomson is toast, Gillard is toast, ALP is burnt toast and the carbon tax is, thank fuck, never going to happen.
Key needs to take note, smell which way the wind is blowing and ditch our ETS as soon as possible. It will come back to bite him and National on the arse.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Gillard, Labor, and the Unions will be doing everything in their power (legitimately or otherwise) to keep Thompson in parliament. I doubt that the police will do anything, it’s probably “not in the public (read Labor’s) interest” to take it past a once over lightly look. Australian police aren’t known as “the best police money can buy” for nothing.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:39 pm
When F.P. Walsh carked it the wife’s Grandad told me (with glee) how the wharfie unionists took the hat round to buy a ton of concrete for the top of his grave, “So the cunt could never climb out again”!
So much for solidarity!
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Thank God the NZ Police aren’t known as “the best police political correctness can buy” Ed!
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Johnboy (5,397) Says:
August 23rd, 2011 at 6:39 pm
When F.P. Walsh carked it the wife’s Grandad told me (with glee) how the wharfie unionists took the hat round to buy a ton of concrete for the top of his grave, “So the cunt could never climb out again”!
So much for solidarity!
Yep its true. A man despised. Evil indeed.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Finton Patrick Walsh batted for the away team in 1951 and as a “scab” was fortunate to even be honored to that extent, I would have thought by the time of his passing the watersiders would have accumulated at least that much spit.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 8:19 pm
Jeeze you two pricks must be as old as me!
Do you still get a laugh out of the young, up and coming lefties, that perform here like I do?
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 8:48 pm
I think Thomson is preparing the ground for a resignation:
Vote:http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-23/craig-thomson-stands-down-from-economics-committee/2852336/?site=newcastle
August 23rd, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Except the police here are the NSW Police which are controlled by the NSW State Liberal Government. Any hint of political interference from the Labour Party will get stamped out hard.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Global Warming is more of a quasi-religious cult or political belief structure, than any scientific theory, thus people are not easily dissuaded from their attachment to it. Ordinary Kiwis are not as quick as Aussies to spot when they have been sold a pup. So the reaction against the ETS will never be strong here.
New Zealand is particularly afflicted with sheep-like mentality. Critical thinking is in short supply. Kiwis just shrug their shoulders and go “OK, if you say so.” There are lots of people in this country who actually think the IPCC is a scientific organisation of impartial experts dedicated to the search for truth!
While the rest of the world is rapidly dropping the whole charade, the gullible fools in this country will still believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming for decades to come, mainly due to reluctance to admit they were taken in by this BS.
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Well Clare Curran’s totally right then. What the hell are some unions doing supporting the Greens after being so staunch toward Labour for so long?
Vote:August 23rd, 2011 at 11:42 pm
the Police say they can’t investigate unless the union complains.
Vote:If so, given the union has not complained , why are the police investigating
August 24th, 2011 at 3:22 am
Poor Julia Gillard, things just keep getting worse for her.
Vote:August 24th, 2011 at 4:34 am
Call in your friendly neighbourhood tax man, if he has taken money from a union then is that not income? If they have given him cash to avoid bankruptcy is that not income? The tax man does not care if the money was clean or dirty but if this was income.
Did not Al Chapone get done not for booze but for tax evasion.
Vote:August 24th, 2011 at 7:51 am
I hear there has been a complaint by an opposition MP but it appears that the union will not cooperate.
Vote:August 24th, 2011 at 10:03 am
@Johnboy, Viking 2 & Gravedodger – “When F.P. Walsh carked it … ”
Why not tell the whole story? Walsh was head of the FOL and a mate of Nash, the acting PM after Fraser’s incapacitation. In 1949, the Watersiders Union withdrew from the FOL and helped establish the Trade Union Congress. Resultantly, there was bad blood between the FOL and TUC.
Sid Holland’s National Party government was elected in November 1949, and the waterside strike (they refused to work overtime) and consequent lockout happened in February 1951, lasting 151 days. The FOL had supported Nash, and it remained onside with Holland’s government. Only 8% of the country’s workforce was actually involved.
The story of burying Walsh under “a ton of concrete” says everything about the quality and substance of unionist mindsets towards each other – evident even today, in the “I’ll get you” sort of petulance so often demonstrated by Labourites. It also underlines the soul-deep idiocy of persons prepared to act so viciously to sustain the transparent nonsense that Walsh’s dead body might have actually come back to life.
Frankly, you might well ask – has the country ever benefitted from anything at all that’s been mooted by Labour or its people?
Vote:August 25th, 2011 at 8:47 am
The Union has now complained to the Police. It was always a police matter. Referring it to FWA (Fair Work Australia) was a way of stalling it as FWA is controlled by the Federal Labour Government whereas the Police are not.
Vote: