Gre gNash A banner of President Trump and former President Grover Cleveland are seen on the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, August 26, 2025. Unions have long sought to blur the distinctions between their interests as organizations and those of the workers they represent. Progressive politicians engage in the same rhetorical sleight-of-hand, touting their working-class bona fides by advocating for policies designed to boost the interests and clout of the unions that back their campaigns.
In reality, the labor movement consists of dues payersand dues takers. While their interests sometimes align, they don’t always.
Case in point: A new regulation recently finalized by the Department of Labor will increase union members’ ability to access financial information about their union so they can better monitor the activity of union officers and staff, evaluate whether union membership is in their interests, and hold unions accountable when they step out of line.
Unsurprisingly, rather than embrace the added accountability towards union members, the AFL-CIO — a national federation of most major labor unions — promptly filed suit in federal court seeking to strike down the regulation on a procedural technicality. In a statement announcing the lawsuit, recently reelected AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler slammed the Trump administration for “[coming] after workers.”
But the facts simply don’t support such overwrought, performative outrage.
Following nearly three years of extensive investigations into misconduct and corruption in the labor movement, Congress in 1959 passed and President Eisenhower signed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, creating a series of measures designed to make unions more accountable to their members.
Among other things, it included a union members’ bill of rights, established minimum standards for union officer elections, and imposed measures designed to safeguard the use of union funds.
It also resulted in the creation of what is now the Office of Labor-Management Standards within the Department of Labor and tasked it with developing, requiring, and collecting annual financial disclosure reports from unions with at least some private-sector members (unions consisting of purely non-federal public employees are not governed by the same statute).
Today, these disclosures are publicly accessible online for any union member to peruse.
Although the forms and the accompanying disclosure requirements have evolved over the years, the last time they were updated was 2003. The continued occurrence of massive scandals among Big Labor’s ranks, such as those that rocked the United Auto Workers, proved that a refresh was overdue.
To that end, the first Trump administration in late 2020 proposed a rule to revise the LM-2 reports filed by most labor organizations and to create a new LM-2 Long Form with additional information fields that would be completed by only the largest unions.
Although workers and union-watchdog organizations backed the rule, the inauguration of President Joe Biden — who had promised to be the “most pro-union president you’ve ever seen” — ensured no further action on the regulation would be forthcoming.
That is now changing. The final rule issued by the Labor Department differs somewhat from the original proposal and could have gone further in some respects. But, all in all, it represents a significant improvement for union transparency and accountability.
If the rule takes effect as scheduled, union members can look forward to more detailed information about their unions’ sources of revenue and the management of union investments and assets. They will be able to differentiate between union expenditures for political purposes and lobbying. Similarly, they will be able to see how their union allocates resources to representing them in contract negotiation and administration versus unionizing new workplaces or industries.
Union officers’ travel expenses will have to be more fully disclosed, not hidden behind credit card payments. Unions will also have to start disclosing the value of the full compensation package paid to union officers and staff, not just their salaries. Union transactions with foreign entities will be separately itemized to facilitate scrutiny.
In other ways, the rule actually eases the disclosure burden on unions. For instance, unions will no longer have to categorize how each union officer and employee uses their time. Smaller unions will also get some relief due to the increase in the revenue thresholds that trigger reporting obligations.
When the predecessor to the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act failed in Congress in 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) excoriated his House colleagues for their dereliction, laying at their feet the “heavy responsibility … when racketeering and gangsterism in the labor movement continue unchecked … Honest union members, informed business men, responsible labor leaders, law enforcement officers, and the general public — all of these will suffer.”
Unfortunately, the unions’ similarly shameful opposition to the Trump administration’s latest attempt to prioritize the interests of American workers is yet another example of the dues-takers looking out for themselves first.
Maxford Nelsen is director of research and government affairs at the Freedom Foundation.
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