Seidemann Shows How CUNY Supports NYPIRG's Fraud

David Seidemann, who is in the geology department of Brooklyn College,  has written an excellent article in City Journal about how insiders at the City University of New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the New York Times collude to enable NYPIRG to defraud New York State's students.

Seidemann says that NYPIRG raises more student funding than any other student group and uses student funding for purposes completely unrelated to CUNY.  When questioned, CUNY officials linked to NYPIRG have resisted investigating the corruption.  NYPIRG's funding at Brooklyn College is now double the student senate's. As well, NYPIRG suppresses dissent on campus.

Seidemann gives this example of NYPIRG-related fraud at CUNY:

When 58 CUNY scientists accused NYPIRG of committing research misconduct, the university appointed a founding member of NYPIRG—now a CUNY vice chancellor—to look into the matter. Predictably, CUNY declined to investigate further, falsely claiming that the research in question had not taken place on campus.

Seidemann outlines how similar abuses have occurred around the country.  

As I have argued, Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code prohibits education institutes from engaging in political lobbying or ideological advocacy, but here we have colleges funneling student activities money into direct political uses that are unrelated to student activities. Not only does this seem to warrant an IRS investigation, but the parties involved should be investigated for fraud.

My Article on Harris v. Quinn and the CUNY Faculty Union in Frontpagemag

My article "Time to Rethink Government Unions" appears in the current issue of  Frontpagemag. I had researched the material about the CUNY faculty union several months earlier, and the Supreme Court's Harris v. Quinn decision on June 30 gave me a context in which to embed the CUNY material. I relied on interviews with David Seidemann and an anonymous officer of the PSC who gave me reams of information about the bizarre goings-on at the PSC Delegate Assembly and Executive Council meetings. The most striking phenomenon I observed during my research was the PSC leadership's omertà. The unwillingness to talk to me extended to the out-group led by former candidate Richard Boris and retired union president Irwin Polishook. 

Especially boorish was Stanley Aronowitz, who agreed to be interviewed by phone at specific times, yet when I called at those times he didn't answer.  He didn't four times.  The PSC's leadership advocates a suppressive ideology, socialism, so it's not surprising that they don't refrain from using violence to take money from members, using the money in violation of the members' free speech rights, and then covering up their actions.  Cover-ups are only problematic when Republicans engage in them.

Professional Staff Congress: a Left-wing Tax Scam

She thinks she's Che Guevara

In Harris v. Quinn, decided last week, the Supreme Court suggested that coercing public sector employees who prefer not to join a union into paying an agency fee may violate the First Amendment.  Agency fees are charged to those who prefer not to join a union, and they usually equal the dues less the amount the union spends on unrelated political activity.  Other forms of union security arrangements are the open shop, the union shop, and the closed shop. The open shop gives employees the freedom to neither join nor pay dues. The union shop coerces employees into joining after they are hired. The closed shop coerces employees into joining before they are hired, and it coerces employers into hiring union members.

The rationale for the agency fee is that nonmember employees benefit from the union's collective bargaining, and were they not to pay an amount equal to the dues, they would be free riders.  In the 1977 case that has governed agency fee arrangements, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that agency fees are legal, but the union must be willing to refund the proportion of dues spent on political lobbying unrelated to bargaining activities.  The reason is that violently coercing nonmembers to support lobbying with which they don't agree violates their freedom of speech. 

But what if a union spends little time on collective bargaining and other workplace-related activities so that all dues either are for unrelated lobbying or are otherwise unrelated to improving working conditions?  That has to be the case with the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC),  because it contributes nothing to my wages.  I earn less than I would in a nonunion environment.  Hence, the Abood claim that I would be a free rider were I to not join my union is nonsensical. 

In the recent Harris v. Quinn case, the court has raised the question as to whether agency fees can ever not involve violations of agency fee payers' First Amendment free speech rights.  The reasons are manifold:  It is difficult to extricate political from other activities; unions lie about how much they spend on politics; ultimately, all public sector union activity may be political.

In the case of Seidemann v. Bowen  (also here) decided in 2009, Brooklyn College geology professor David Seidemann sued to determine the actual amount of  dues that the PSC spends on political activity.  The union repeatedly lied about the amount; initially, they claimed less than one percent, yet the case was settled at a point at which Seidemann and his pro bono Jones Day attorney had determined that they spend 14%.  Seidemann believes that the true amount is closer to 20%, but the cost of further pursuing the case has been prohibitive. Part of the settlement was that the union paid $250,000 in legal fees to Jones Day. Few foundations can afford that kind of money for a venture with an ambiguous outcome.

As left-wing extremists led by President Barbara Bowen, an authoritarian, left-wing kook who thinks she's Che Guevara, the union leadership thinks little about using government-enforced violence to coerce dues money from faculty who do not agree with them.  They have repeatedly refused to represent faculty with whom they disagree, and they chiefly support the left-wing Working Families Party, a simple-minded band of economic illiterates who favor failed, reactionary, big-government solutions.  In choosing to openly affiliate itself with and pay the lion's share of campaign contributions to a third party, the PSC has ensured that conservative Democrats and Republicans will have little interest in supporting its cause.

The union serves as a conduit of tax-favored money from the taxpayers to the fringe left.  Public money is budgeted to CUNY and used for faculty salaries; as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization CUNY pays no taxes; faculty dues are collected on a tax-deductible basis; the union does not pay taxes, and as a 501(c)(5) tax-exempt organization, it donates the dues tax free to the Working Families Party, likely claiming that all of the issues it lobbies about are related to its purpose, which is what 501(c)(5) requires. That, of course, is nonsense.   

The June 19, 2014 minutes of the Delegates Assembly of the Professional Staff Congress states that the assembly resolved that the ROTC should not be institutionalized at CUNY. It spent much of its time discussing how situations in which it, and the American Federation of Teachers, to whom it contributes, should coordinate situations in which the two organizations make donations to different candidates.  It also passed a resolution favoring restitution of pensions to Detroit municipal employees.  It also developed a foreign policy.  Its resolution says this:

Resolved, the AFT concur with the AFL-CIO National Executive Committee, which declared in August 2011: 'The miliatarization of our foreign policy has proven to be a costly mistake. It is time to invest at home,' and that the AFT call for funds freed by reductions in military and national security spending to be reallocated to many urgent human needs; and

Resolved, that the AFT call for US foreign policy regarding international conflicts to be guided by strategies that prioritize the needs of working people everywhere and the use of negotiation and diplomatic means over military deployment, whether in Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Pakistan, or other 'hot-spots' as they may emerge...

In addition, it passed resolutions concerning the legacy of slavery, the Mayday$5K national movement for slavery, and Coca Cola's abuse of children and violation of human rights. Coca Cola's exploits overseas are indubitably within the purpose of a New York faculty union. Obama says so, for why should the PSC pay taxes if Tony Rezko and Timothy Geithner didn't?

In addition, about 5% of the minutes describe a collective bargaining update in which Bowen describes two contract settlements at the UFT and TWU.  The minutes do not explain why CUNY has not drawn up a contract with its faculty since 2007, nor do I sense from the minutes that they  care.

The question the Supreme Court should have raised and didn't is whether public sector unions serve as scams to avoid income taxes on contributions to left-wing Democrats, the Working Families Party, and other left-wing causes.  

David Seidemann Comments on the PSC's Use of CUNY's E-mail

Dear Mitchell,

To reinforce your argument, allow me to point out two things:

1) The Second Circuit Carroll case regarding NYPIRG funding specifies that NYPIRG is an ideologic organization.

2) An internal NYPIRG memo leaked to the press in the mid 1990s shows, among many things damaging to NYPIRG, that it uses its classroom pitches as a recruitment tool.

Further, there is now a court case pending that addresses CUNY's entanglement with NYPIRG and the variety of First Amendment violations that flow from that.

David

My Letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education printed my letter concerning David Seidemann's case here:

To the Editor:

The remarks of union officials quoted in "Federal Judge Rules Against Faculty Union on Refunds of Nonmembers' Dues" (The Chronicle, April 25) are misleading. There have been considerable "soft" activities by the leadership of the faculty union at the City University of New York involving protests, demonstrations, and conferences about the war in Iraq. The leadership is paid salaries to represent the faculty, but much of the leaders' time has been spent in antiwar and other political protests.

To be fair, agency dues payments should be reduced by the proportion that salaries for the union leadership's time spent on unrelated political activities bears to the union's total budget.

The article quotes Christopher M. Callagy, a union attorney, as saying that the union's chief political efforts have been in Albany. The union leadership has many times notified faculty members about antiwar protests via CUNY's e-mail system and used union officials' time and union resources for such protests, conferences, and related activities.

Professor David E. Seidemann's case does not go far enough. Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association, on which Magistrate Judge Lois Bloom relies in Seidemann v. Bowen, anticipates that agency payers may be free riders because they receive the benefit of collective bargaining but would not contribute to the costs of negotiation if they did not pay dues. But the Professional Staff Congress has won no benefits for its membership. Rather, because of its adversarial approach, it has managed to diminish faculty wages and benefits relative to virtually every other New York union.

Mitchell Langbert
Associate Professor of Business, Management, and Finance
Brooklyn College
City University of New York
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Karkhanis Blasts Professional Staff Congress

Sharad Karkhanis, who has been attacked in a Professional Staff Congress (PSC)-related law suit, has just released his latest newsletter, Patriot Returns. Karkhanis offers brilliant coverage of David Seidemann's case, about which Candace de Russy and I have blogged. The Chronicle of Higher Education has also covered the case. Karkhanis notes:

"Convinced that the PSC had treated agency-fee payers unfairly, David Seidemann, a Yale educated full professor of Geology at Brooklyn College, has been patient and tenacious in seeking justice. Since 2002, he's amassed voluminous documentation, collected and examined all relevant information and legal precedents, and pursued the PSC with the tenacity and conviction of an irate faculty member. Seidemann sensed that there was some hanky panky going on with his and your hard-earned dollars. The 1% of our gross salary that goes to union dues or agency fees should be spent for our benefit rather than being diverted to further the New Caucasians' political agenda."

Karkhanis asks:

"Our question is, although permissible in the eyes of the law for the union to spend monies to march, parade and shout out loud to bring pressure on the management on behalf of the dues paying members, how germane is it for the PSC to spend dues money on excessive participation in such activities?"

See the entire blog here. The PSC leadership has spent its time on anti-Iraqi War crusades while neglecting its function of representing faculty. Barbara Bowen and her colleagues have failed CUNY's faculty.

Chronicle of Higher Ed on Seidemann Case

I sent out a small press release concerning David Seidemann's victory in district court against the leadership of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Reporter David Glenn of the Chronicle of Higher Education called to thank me for the information and the story ran today (paid access). The article is accurate and even handed. David Glenn's reporting is excellent.

In addition to sending out the press release I had invited Barbara Bowen, Nancy Romer, Steve London, Stanley Aronowitz and several other members of PSC's administration office to comment on my last blog on the recent ruling, but none has responded.

The article points out that Dorothee Benz, a union employee, claims that

"the 'vast majority' of the disputed spending has been allocated to lobbying campaigns to encourage state and local governments to provide financial support to the university, not on political causes that have nothing to do with professors' wages or benefits."

However, this is misleading for two reasons. First, there have been considerable "soft money" activities by the union leadership involving Iraqi War protests, demonstrations and conferences. The leadership is paid salaries to participate in these activities. To be fair, agency dues payments should be reduced by the proportion that salaries for the union leadership's time spent on such political activites bears to the union's total budget. Second, lobbying typically involves political as well as wage and benefit concerns, as Professor Seidemann points out in the article.

An additional concern is that the union has used CUNY facilities to send e-mails and used CUNY facilities to conduct meetings of a political nature. Since CUNY is a section 501(c)(3) organization, the repeated use of CUNY facilities to further the Professional Staff Congress's political goals is inappropriate and likely a breach of the tax code's requirements for charitable and educational institutions (that is, that they not be used for political purposes).

The article quotes Christopher M. Callagy, a union attorney, as saying that the union's chief political efforts are in Albany. This is a lie. The union leadership has repeatedly notified faculty of Iraqi War protests, and used their time and union resources for such protests.

Moreover, the article points out that even Albany lobbying is not considered a collective bargaining expense:

"Mr. Seidemann pointed out in an interview on Wednesday. 'Lobbying for an increased budget for education—that is a political act,' Mr. Seidemann said. ['']There may be people who think education should be supported by property taxes or should be supported totally by tuition.' Mr. Seidemann said that...he distrusts the union's management and wants to give it as little financial support as possible. "

The article adds that Professor Seidemann is continuing with a further complaint. He is asking the judge to require that the union file its financial data online on a specific date. No more Enron-style financials for the Professional Staff Congress.

Professor Seidemann has performed an important social service, and he deserves an award. However, I would argue that his case does not go far enough. The case of Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association on which Judge Lois Bloom relies in the Seidemann case assumes that agency payers may be free riders because they receive union benefits but do not contribute to the costs of negotiation. But the PSC has won no benefits for its membership. Rather, because of the PSC's incompetent negotiation stance, silly demonstrations, and adverserial approach, the union has managed to diminish faculty wages and benefits. An equitable rendering of the Lehnert decision ought to be that where unions reduce wages, agency payers should be reimbursed for their losses because of the union's incompetence. Perhaps the next step ought to be to try this case under equity principles.