On May 22, Carole Reeves, former office manager for Sheet Metal Workers Local 23, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska to three years of probation and fined $6,000 for embezzling funds from the Anchorage local. Reeves had been charged in January with stealing $19,663.33 through the use of unauthorized union credit card purchases. Immediately after that, she signed a plea agreement enabling her to avoid prison time. By then she already had repaid the full amount embezzled. The Sheet Metal Workers and the United Transportation Union merged last year to form a new union called SMART. The actions follow a probe by the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.
