Head of California's largest union arrested for theft, fraud | Hacker News Reader

Head of California's largest union arrested for theft, fraud

mercurynews.com

121 pointsrsj_hn29 comments

Basically she and husband didn't report all income and used campaign money for personal expenses.

Yes paying taxes is annoying, but these people earn solid money, why throw it away for relatively small savings. Say they saved 36% on a mil, spread over 6 years, Was it worth the extra $60K a year between the two of them when they had good jobs, political power, clean records?

Especially when you are union, thus generally pro gov't spending so are pushing everyone else to pay taxes.

"Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office alleges the pair under-reported more than $1 million in income over the past six years, including $176,000 in 2016, $416,000 in 2017, and $666,000 in 2018.

The complaint also alleges Hernandez unlawfully took political campaign money for personal use in 2014 and 2015."

It looks pretty bad when the husband of a union boss was paying workers off the books, which denies worker protections to employees.

And they may not have reported the income because it didn't come from legitimate sources.

This is California, they were probably undocumented, which will make people less mad at him.

I can not tell, is it better because he employ them or worse sense he probably pay them below market and so is "exploiting"? Sometimes it is hard to find how Californian thinks.

He might not be paying them below market- the way this often works is that the people you employ from the old country are cousins, neighbors of your parents, etc. Not people you would feel comfortable being awful to.

> Especially when you are union, thus generally pro gov't spending so are pushing everyone else to pay taxes.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why would pro-union equal pro-government spending and also pro-higher taxes? They seem unrelated to each other.

I don't know much about unions but that particular union in CA represents a lot of government employees. In San Francisco every union leader I talked to was also very pro-government spending, like usually the way they see problems getting solved is by the government spending more money on them, but my sample may be biased.

The people in the unions, and the leaders, are not "pro government spending" they are pro "the government spends money on me" it is a small but important difference.

That runs close to a distinction without a difference.

The government is a massive organization. Ignoring the cynical interperatation, it is entirely reasonable to think that there are some legitamate areas for the government to spend on; as long as the worker is in one of those areas, there is no dissonance.

Alternativly, someone could think 'I want to work in industry X. I think X should be privatised, but since it is government run, I'll work for the government'.

Further the cynical answer of 'the government shouldn't be spending so much money. But as long as they are, I should get some' isn't that bad of an answer

Unions are a tool to contain and prevent abusive practices by companies in a free market.

As a result, most union members are going to be pretty anti capitalist in nature, or at the very least against unregulated capitalism. They would much rather have the abusive practices they protest against banned.

The alternatives to an unregulated free economy are either a state managed economy (communist style) or free-ish markets regulated by a government that sets the rules and limits the damages of the competition, by providing both regulations and safety nets (social democracy). both of those approaches require a strong state, which is were you get pro-government and pro-higher taxes.

I guess you could, theoretically, have unions that see themselves as the only necessary opposition against companies' power in a free market, and which see no need for legal protection for their own activities. It's a weird middle point though, and I certainly have never seen a person hold those beliefs.

The strongest unions tend to be government workers because without a free market they have the fewest options. Air traffic controllers work for the FAA or the do something else. Even when their are options like private prisons or schools, when the overwhelming majority of jobs are through a single entity individual employees simply have zero leverage.

Fair point, but for those cases it's pretty clear why they're pro government - they're it :)

For the unions it tends to be a very adversarial arrangement, though they will sometimes make nice to the press.

Regarding your last point,there's syndicalism, a political theory in which the main organizational unit of society is the union and there's little to no government, everything is negotiated between the different unions representing the various workers. It was somewhat popular around and after WWI, but is pretty much dead now.

Those figures are well over a million just for 3 of the six years. For example, just in 2018 they evaded about 300K in taxes. Top marginal income tax rate in CA is about 48% IIRC.

in california that number is closer to 50% than 36%, but yeah i agree that its probably not worth it though maybe they thought they were untouchable due to their position

I wonder how much of this was their direct action, and how much of it was them thinking they had plausible deniability because they were going through an intermediary like a CPA or financial planner or something. In the end it doesn't matter, they sign the forms, they own the decision.

Power corrupts.

Power attracts the corrupt.

Good riddance. Too many people in the labor movement who are not there for the right reasons.

This is the union:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Employees_Internatio...

Jimmy Hoffa came to mind when I saw the headline.

Although it seems there was no organized mafia element to their fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa

Fun fact: Jimmy Hoffa remained president of the union even after being convicted and imprisoned. He only resigned as part of his commutation agreement with Nixon.

As someone who comes from Europe, I find the culture and corruption of American unions to be very puzzling. It seems to be the case from the very beginning of the American labor movement, and in the past the corruption seemed to have been at an even higher level. I'd love to see someone explain this. Why does the task of organizing workers promote corruption in the U.S. more than in Germany? And can anything be done to change this? Shedding this image would certainly help promote unionization.

> Why does the task of organizing workers promote corruption in the U.S. more than in Germany?

That task doesn't.

(Neither does the task of law enforcement, or government, or corporate management.)

America’s corruption isn't task specific.

The very beginning of the labor movement was super violent- pitched battles to keep scabs from crossing picket lines. Organized crime came from the same neighborhoods and communities as striking union workers, so they helped provide muscle for the workers. Then they stuck around.

I think this is mostly a relic of the past though- most union members are in government or the service industries now, without any of those ties or history.

It doesn't. There was the famous Volkswagen union corruption scandal:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/business/vw-expenses-frau...

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