It is impossible to say just how much unions spend on political campaigns; certainly one can’t tell from the amounts officially reported, which invariably present a grossly distorted picture. In 1956, for example, Labor officially acknowledged expenditures of $941,271. According to that official report, $79,939 of the total was spent in the State of Michigan. However, a Senate investigating committee obtained evidence that in that year each of Michigan’s 700,000 union members had been assessed $1.20 as a contribution to a “citizenship fund,” and that this money was made available for political activities. This suggests that labor spent, from that one source alone, almost a million dollars in Michigan instead of $79,000. By projecting the difference on a nation-wide scale we get a more realistic idea of the size of Labor’s political contributions. Union political activity is not confined, of course, to direct financial contributions. In fact, this is one of its smallest endeavors. Unions provide manpower for election day chores--for making phone calls, driving cars, manning the polls and so on. Often the union members who perform these chores are reimbursed for their time-off out of union funds. Unions also sponsor radio and television programs and distribute a huge volume of printed material designed to support the candidate of the union’s choice. In short, they perform all the functions of a regular party organization. Now the evil here is twofold. For one thing, the union’s decision whether to support candidate X or candidate Y--whether to help the Republican Party or the Democratic Party--is not reached by a poll of the union membership. It is made by a handful of top union officers. These few men are thus able to wield tremendous political power in virtue of their ability to spend other people’s money. No one else in America is so privileged. The other evil is more serious. Individual union members are denied the right to decide for themselves how to spend their money. Certainly a moral issue is at stake here. _Is it morally permissible to take the money of a Republican union member, for example, and spend it on behalf of a Democrat?_ The travesty is deeper, of course, when the money takes the form of compulsory union dues. Under union shop conditions, the only way an individual can avoid contributing to the political campaign of a candidate whom he may not approve is to give up his job.