When union leaders are not working for their workers
by E.J. Antoni · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Last month, a House hearing exposed eight years of America’s industrial unions spending members’ money on union leaders’ personal priorities rather than on members.
The findings should change the way Washington hears union leaders when they claim to speak for workers.
First are political donations. The railroad brotherhoods’ PACs sent 95% to 99% of their party committee dollars to Democrats, and the conductors’ union made far-left EMILY’s List its single largest recipient.
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Yet when the Teamsters, parent of some rail unions, polled its members in 2024, roughly 60% backed President Trump.
Then there are questionable expenditures. These include the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers–Transportation Division, the largest railroad labor union in North America, spending $3.9 million at Caesars Entertainment in 2024 — part of nearly $10 million on casinos and resorts over eight years.
Meanwhile, its president earned more than five times the median pay of a railroad worker. Apparently, it is wrong only when management does it.
Similarly, two former United Auto Workers presidents went to prison for spending members’ dues on golf, cigars and Palm Springs villas.
The same divide appears in the policies that union leaders push, such as the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which passed the House in June. Under the act, if a union and an employer cannot agree on a first contract within roughly four months, a three-member arbitration panel would impose one, binding for two years, without workers themselves being able to vote on it.
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It guarantees that union leadership collects dues without risking members’ rejection of the terms. It short-circuits a process by which members have a basic check on those allegedly bargaining in their name.
Union leaders have also spent years pushing to replace secret-ballot elections with public card signings, letting organizers know how members vote and thereby exposing those members to pressure and even retaliation.
The rail unions’ latest top priority, the Railway Safety Act, fits the pattern. Recently attached to the House transportation bill, its centerpiece is a federal mandate to increase freight crew sizes. Leadership loves it because every additional crew seat written into federal law is a stream of dues that cannot be bargained away for things members might actually want, such as higher pay or better schedules.
Although union leaders claim this is about crew safety and cite the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment as their motivation, they have been pushing for enlarged crews for years before the Ohio disaster. Furthermore, the East Palestine crash train crew had an extra crew member on board, and that practice did not prevent the accident.
Likewise, federal regulators have repeatedly conceded they lack data showing that an additional crew member prevents accidents. The industry reports that 2025 was its safest year on record across several measures, largely thanks to technology. These are advancements that the bill threatens.
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When BNSF Railway tested automated track inspection, its track geometry cars found 64,657 defects while covering 97% fewer miles than human inspectors, who found only 4,796.
Rail unions fought that shift at every turn, and now they want the Railway Safety Act to undo this technological progress, expanding manual inspection mandates and freezing detector rules just as better monitoring arrives.
These moves would not only make the rails less safe by catching fewer defects but also expose inspectors to greater danger.
Sadly, union leadership keeps rejecting railroads’ better offers to members. Union Pacific proposed piloting ground-based conductor jobs with regular shifts and the chance for workers to sleep in their own beds every night, a real improvement over the unpredictable, days-away-from-home schedules widely considered the worst part of the job. SMART-TD agreed to the pilot only on the condition that Union Pacific maintain current crew sizes and drop negotiations to reduce crew size.
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Rank-and-file railroaders could have regular schedules, safer jobs and technology that makes their work less dangerous, but the Railway Safety Act delivers none of that. Union leadership prefers headcount and dues instead.
This failure of leadership will also harm families because the compliance costs of these draconian measures are in the tens of billions of dollars, costs that flow to farmers, manufacturers, energy producers — anyone who uses railroads — and to family budgets. Higher rail costs also shift freight to trucks, leading to more highway congestion and crashes.
Union leaders have a responsibility to do what is best for their members, not pad their own pockets or enrich their political cronies. Washington would do well to remember as much.
• E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist and the Richard Aster fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
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