UNITE HERE

On July 29, Terry Hacker, former secretary-treasurer for UNITE HERE Local 12 in Cincinnati, was charged in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio with one count of embezzling $38,146 in union funds. The information count follows an investigation by the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards.

Guilt by association isn’t the way justice operates in this country.  Still, there are a few people out there scrutinizing the associations of Paramus, N.J. Administrator Anthony Iacono.  Iacono, hired by the Borough of Paramus this past August, had been a member of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union Local 69 until he resigned in 2002.  His resignation, noted the union public review board, had an ulterior motive:  to avoid talking to an investigator working for a federal monitor assigned to oversee the affairs of HERE.  He might have had good reason.

A theft in the four figures might not seem worth a year-long investigation.  But UNITE HERE is a union unlikely to leave things to chance – especially given its recent history of federal supervision.  On May 1, the union’s ethics board took disciplinary action against two top officials of Local 355, representing 2,700 hotel, restaurant and catering workers in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area.  Jorge Santiesteban and Andre J. Balash, respectively, the local’s president and secretary-treasurer, were forced out of their positions after a UNITE HERE internal probe concluded the pair had diverted union funds toward personal expenses, among other violations.  The New York City-based international union also recommended placing the local under trusteeship.

The new Democratic-controlled Congress has brought a fresh “to-do” issue list.  And with the exception of the war in Iraq, arguably no issue ranks higher on the lawmakers’ agenda than immigration reform.  “Reform,” however, is a highly fungible term.  Too often, it means perpetuating, and even expanding, Third World mass immigration – the very thing that led to the cries for reform in the first place.  Opinion polls this decade repeatedly indicate most Americans want more restrictions placed on immigration, and not because they are “anti-immigrant,” but because they believe the nation needs a breather from the consequences of high levels of immigration, especially by ethnic groups whose leaders often are avowedly hostile to assimilation.  But the pressure that citizens exert on Congress tends to be less pronounced than that exerted by interest groups with a stake in maintaining a high flow of immigrants, legal or not.  Last year, a Special Report issued by the National Legal and Policy Center presented strong evidence that unions, along with big business and radical ethnic separatists, during this decade have worked closely with one another to block immigration reform under the guise of promoting it.  Already this young year, the coalition has asserted itself.