Wall Street Journal claim about union political spending double-counts many union dollars

The Wall Street Journal's big attempt to imply that unions spend more on politics than previously reported, and therefore are not badly outspent by the Koch brothers and Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate big money, is easily identified as an early strike in a new form of attack on unions. It's an attack that has obvious, glaring holes in its argument. But it turns out the Wall Street Journal also double-counts many union expenditures. An AFL-CIO backgrounder explains:

Whether it's by local affiliates or national coalitions or the AFLCIO and affiliates, coordinated activity of, by and for working people often includes recirculating financial resources between organizations so that it can be used most efficiently. Being honest and transparent in filling out a form not designed to answer the question that the Wall Street Journal asked, multiple labor organizations will report having spent the very same dollar. Because the LM2 form is not designed to enable disentangling that money, we cannot know precisely how much double or triple counting is embedded within the WSJ's summation, but we know it is considerable.

In other words, maybe the national level of a union sends money to a local trying to fight for, say, a paid sick leave ordinance. The national discloses that expenditure as political in its Department of Labor filings. Then the local union spends the money on its campaign and discloses that to the Department of Labor. The exact same money shows up twice. And yeah, if you double-count union political spending it's going to look higher than it does if you don't double-count it.

That said, whether each dollar unions spend on politics, broadly construed, is counted once, twice, or three times, it's important to remember that the Wall Street Journal isn't just talking about money unions are spending to elect politicians, it's using an incredibly broad definition of what constitutes political spending, one that includes everything we would normally describe as policy spending'paid sick leave, workplace safety, health care, minimum wage, immigration, civil rights, family and medical leave. On top of that, the implication that union spending must be closer to Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce levels than previously thought is only possible to begin with because unions disclose so much more than businesses and corporate lobbies. Equal disclosure would likely show that just as corporate interests do more traditional elections spending and more lobbying than unions, they also spend more on the things they do not disclose that unions do. But there's going to be a really big right-wing campaign to get you thinking about union money and keep you from thinking about corporate money.