OLMS Accused of Harassing Unions

The ACSBlog has this write-up on an article that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday about a report by the Center for American Progress which accuses the Office of Labor Management Standards under the Bush administration of attempting to bury unions in paper work:

The Center for American Progress has released a new report entitled, "Beyond Justice: Bush Administration's Labor Department Abuses Labor Union Regulatory Authorities," by Scott Lilly.

In the report's introduction, Lilly points out that in recent years many regulatory agencies have laxly enforced their rules "to the significant financial benefit of certain businesses and at the expense of those whose health and safety those laws were designed to protect." But in the governance of organized labor, "rigorous and in fact pernicious regulatory enforcement was the course chosen by the Bush administration."

Lilly argues that the "underlying purpose, of course, is to undermine the reputation of the labor union movement through a classic political misinformation campaign—all under the supervision of a lifelong partisan political operative whose career has been dedicated to the destruction of his political opponents.

The Washington Post article points out that the paperwork burden on unions has increased 60% since 2005.

This is hardly surprising when one considers that:

[t]he standards office has been led since 2005 by Don Todd, a former Republican National Committee strategist. Todd is credited with helping George H.W. Bush win the presidency in 1988 by convincing Lee Atwater to use a television ad featuring furloughed murderer Willie Horton and portraying Bush's Democratic challenger as soft on crime.

Don't want to be overly cycnical but isn't putting someome like Todd in charge of OLMS like putting the fox in charge of guarding the hen house?

Hat Tip: Joe Slater

PS