Labor bosses don't share workers' pain

The Detroit News reports:

In the past five years, pink slips have descended upon tens of thousands of union workers in Michigan, while others have seen their health care and pension benefits gutted and wages frozen or cut.

But in many cases, labor's pain stops at the union hall door.

During the toughest economic times for organized labor in decades, union leaders are more likely to keep their jobs and get raises than the members they serve. A Detroit News analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data revealed a growing pay divide between labor bosses and the rank and file who pay their salaries with their dues.

Michigan's biggest unions represented 60,000 fewer workers in 2006 compared with 2002. While membership plummeted 14 percent, jobs at union halls remained safe, dropping less than 1 percent.

Workers who kept their jobs saw the disparity between their paychecks and those of their union bosses grow. The pay gap between the state's 50 top-paid labor leaders and union workers has grown by $18,000 since 2002 -- an economic chasm expanding by almost $10 a day. Records supplied to the Labor Department by the unions themselves show that the state's 50 top-paid union officials now earn an average of $186,000. More than 1,000 labor officers and staffers in Michigan made more than $100,000 in 2006, more than twice as much as the average union worker.

Don't the union bosses care about the workers?