Dues Abuses
Lavish Salaries for Union Leaders
A good union represents its members well and spends their money wisely. We need your help to get UNITE HERE leaders to stop wasting their members’ money on lavish salaries – and to stop their illegal organizing tactics which are costing their current members tens of millions of dollars in legal costs and penalties.
UNITE HERE Presidents John Wilhelm and Bruce Raynor each pulled in over $248,000 last year -- ten times more than the average salary of a unionized hotel worker (according to data from the 2006 Union Membership and Earnings Databook.) The average annual salary for the fifty best-paid UNITE HERE officials is $102,000. Add on top of that generous expense accounts, and UNITE HERE’s leaders are cleaning up while their members get cleaned out.
But in recent court testimony UNITE HERE’s top lawyer tried to say that his union shouldn’t have to pay more in damages for its defamation of medical professionals because it would “cripple the organization.” He said:
We will have to layoff more workers and – I’m sorry, more of our employees and the people who will suffer really will be the workers that we represent because we won’t be able to provide them with the services that we have been able to provided them with … And, you know, the more money we have to pay out for this case, the less will be available to us and the more cuts we’ll have to make. It will cripple the organization.
Mounting Legal Bills for the Union
Consider these mounting legal bills – to be paid by current and future UNITE HERE members – for their legal offenses:
- $17.3 million for defaming Sutter Health in California
- As much as $5 million in statutory damages to Cintas employees for invading their privacy during an organizing campaign
- As-yet-undetermined attorneys’ fees for those Cintas employees
- As much as $74 million that could be ordered to be paid to its own former employees who have seen their life insurance benefits slashed to almost nothing
