OPINION:
Union membership has fallen, but the impact of public-sector unions on federal politics still seems as strong as ever. How could this be? It sounds like a mystery, but it isn’t.
Government employees who are members of unions are allowed to take something called “official time,” which is actually a “time-out,” and during a time-out they can legally ignore their actual jobs and focus on labor union organizing. They’re still paid their government salaries. The unions get free organizing by these government employees and the unsuspecting taxpayers pick up the tab. This is a sweetheart contract for sure.
The Washington Times reports that the IRS regularly lends — a nice way of saying “rents” — government workers to the National Treasury Employees Union. IRS employees, freed from duties harassing taxpayers, spent 573,000 hours working on union business in 2012, a typical year. This is the equivalent of 286 full-time employees performing nothing but union work.
A new report by the Government Accountability Office reveals that the abuse of official time spreads far beyond the IRS. According to the GAO, federal employees spent more than 2.5 million hours on union work in 2013 — up from 1.9 million hours of official time used in 2006, the last time the GAO looked at the issue. The website watchdog.org reports that during fiscal 2013, “more than 10,500 federal employees clocked at least one hour of official time.”
The GAO’s report only considers official time taken by workers of the 10 largest federal agencies, so the government may be renting workers to the government unions at a far greater rate than even these gaudy numbers indicate.
Taxpayers are paying a steep price for the scheme. In 2012, the Office of Personnel Management calculated that $157 million in public funds was spent to pay for this arrangement. That figure, too, is likely only a fraction of the actual cost to taxpayers, according to the GAO. Investigators found that “agencies are most often managing the use of official time [with]an approach that has no specified number of hours,” making it impossible to accurately track how many tax dollars actually paid for “official time.”
The GAO report, however, determined which agencies were the greatest offenders. The Department of Veterans Affairs allowed 265,000 employees to spend nearly 1.1 million hours on union work. According to the Office of Personnel Management, the average full-time federal employee earns $37.74 an hour. Thus, taxpayers pay almost $14 million a year for VA workers to perform union “duties.” If these workers were assigned to their real duties instead of “duties” for their unions, the veterans of the nation’s wars, who put their lives on the line heeding the call of duty, honor and country, would get the care and attention they deserve.
Employees of the Treasury Department devoted 531,000 hours to union work. Homeland Security, Department of Transportation and Social Security Administration workers put their actual jobs aside to focus on tasks for their unions for a combined total of 763,000 hours in the typical year.
“Official time” represents government “of the unions, by the unions, for the unions” and there’s no place for it in the government. Allowing unions to co-opt government workers for official time harms the ability of federal agencies to adequately perform their functions and properly serve America. It creates an unfair class system where public employee unions have the ability, at no cost to them, to draft an army of public employees to advance the unions’ political agenda and to lobby for higher pay and greater benefits. Many of the ideas that result from this work on authentic official time harms the taxpayers who pay the tab for the scheme.
Unions should be free to use government employees however they like, as long as those workers aren’t “on the clock,” being paid by the public. The rest of us deserve a break.
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