By Dave Lemery |
The Center Square
The SCI-Huntingdon prison in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
HUNTINGTON PENNSYLVANIA (JANUARY 2020)–Three Pennsylvania corrections officers are suing their union over allegations that tens of thousands of dollars in union funds were misspent by officials.
The lawsuit
was filed on behalf of the three Huntingdon-area workers by The Fairness Center, a legal advocacy group that has pursued a number of high-profile cases by public sector workers claiming they were harmed by their unions’ practices or by state laws relating to public sector unions.
The three workers – Cory Yedlosky, William Weyandt and Chris Taylor – allege in the lawsuit that the former treasurer of the State Correctional Institution-Huntingdon Local of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association wrote himself and the local’s secretary checks amounting to about $20,000 that were not approved expenses.
\”[T]he Local’s treasurer wrote nearly fifteen thousand dollars in checks to himself from the Local’s account, for which there appears no legitimate union business has been established, including purported charitable donations that seem to have never been made, and another nearly six thousand dollars in checks to himself or to the Local’s secretary for purported cell phone reimbursements to which neither was entitled,\” the lawsuit says.
The three plaintiffs say they uncovered the wrongdoing after former treasurer Bryan Peroni and former secretary Douglas Clark had left those roles.
According to the lawsuit, Peroni used his own name and home address on bank accounts for the local, and he wrote checks without the oversight of any other union officer. Among those checks were cellphone reimbursements for himself and Clark, the lawsuit states, even though union rules only allow such reimbursements for the local’s president and vice president.
The lawsuit also claims that Peroni wrote $11,400 in checks to himself that were supposedly reimbursements for donations to local charities, but the organizations in question don’t have any records of such donations.
“Public-sector unions have a legal duty to fairly represent members’ interests, but in this case union leaders were asleep at the wheel,” the Fairness Center’s Nathan McGrath said in a news release. “State union officials did not enforce their own financial rules, and when our clients submitted evidence of irregularities it seems nothing was done to correct that. They have no choice but to sue their unions to find out what happened to nearly $20,000 in members’ dues.”
published here by Gloucestercitynews.net with permission
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