House Democrats Resist Corruption Hearings as UAW Convictions Pile Up

United Auto Workers members leave the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Warren Truck Plant in Warren, Mich., on May 18, 2020. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) has asked House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) three times to schedule a hearing on union corruption but has yet to get a response. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has finalized a new rule meant to close a loophole used to the advantage of union officials.

“It’s clear union leaders feel almost no accountability to the workers whose dues fund their organizations and salaries,“ Foxx, the ranking Republican on the panel, recently told The Epoch Times. ”That is why I formally requested three different times that the committee hold a hearing to investigate union corruption, all of which have been ignored by the Democrat majority, the same Democrat majority that passed legislation earlier this year that would make unions more powerful but less accountable.”

A Scott spokesman didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on Foxx’s requests or for a statement on how the panel’s chairman views the issue of union corruption.

The union corruption issue has been prominent in recent news headlines as a parade of present and former senior United Auto Workers (UAW) officials have pleaded guilty in a continuing Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation.

As The Epoch Times reported earlier this month, the most recent pleading came from former UAW President Gary Jones, who confessed to conspiring with other top officials of the storied labor organization to embezzle more than $1 million in member dues in an attempt to further racketeering and tax evasion activities.

Jones, 63, “pled guilty to one count of conspiring to embezzle UAW dues money and conspiring to use a facility of interstate commerce to aid racketeering crimes between 2010 and September 2019,” the DOJ announced June 3.

“He also pled guilty to a separate count of conspiring to defraud the United States by evading the payment of taxes on embezzled funds and causing the UAW to file false tax returns during the same period of time,” the DOJ said.

Jones is among 14 UAW officials convicted in the DOJ probe; four more are awaiting sentencing.

But the UAW isn’t alone among the biggest names in America’s major unions in both the private and public sectors in facing widespread allegations of internal corruption as well as multiple convictions in federal courts in recent years.

Since 2010, according to a Department of Labor (DOL) official who requested anonymity, the United Steelworkers Union (USW) has seen 112 former officials convicted of a multitude of crimes, including embezzlement, wire fraud, tax evasion, and failure to file mandatory financial disclosures or filing fraudulent reports.