The U.S. Department of Labor has launched a new tool designed to make union financial disclosures more accessible to members, employees, and the public.
While unions have been required to file annual financial reports for decades, the department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) recognized the need to make the data more user-friendly.
I have written extensively on teachers’ unions’ annual financial reports, known as LM-2 reports, as they include information on membership, spending, and compensation for union officers and staff. But these reports are often hundreds of pages long and difficult to navigate, limiting their usefulness.
OLMS’s new data visualization tool addresses this. The initial phase includes LM-2 data, which covers the nation’s largest unions and contains some of the most detailed and complex disclosures. Now, the data is in a far more accessible format. Users can track trends in union finances — including changes in dues revenue, membership, spending priorities, and compensation — through interactive graphs, charts, searchable tables, and multi-year comparisons. This helps “union members engage in the governance of their unions” and helps “employees make informed choices about union representation,” according to Elisabeth Messenger, director of OLMS.
For example, data from Education Minnesota (the state’s teachers’ union) can now be viewed at a glance rather than pieced together from multiple reports. Users can quickly see patterns such as declining membership, rising dues, growth in political spending, and increased employee compensation.
This level of transparency is applauded and long overdue. In 2019, other think tank representatives and I met with the U.S. Department of Labor. Improving transparency and accessibility in these filings was a top reform priority we discussed.
OLMS has announced phase two is now underway, which will expand data visualization to additional reporting forms filed by employers and their labor relations consultants.
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Look up reports filed by labor organizations, employers, labor relations consultants, and others here. Learn how to navigate the data visualization tool here.
