American Federation of Government Employees

Official Time: Union Activity on the Taxpayers’ Dime

by Ivan Osorio on June 2, 2011

in Employment, Labor

Government Executive summarizes the Office of Personnel Management’s report on the use of official time, whereby unionized federal employees carry out union business while being paid by the government — i.e. taxpayers. The House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and Labor Policy yesterday held a hearing on the topic, where CEI Labor Policy Counsel F. Vincent Vernuccio testified.

The report, the subject of a Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill, found that federal employees spent nearly 3 million hours of official time on union activities in 2009 at a cost of $129 million to taxpayers, an increase of $8 million from fiscal 2008. The number of official time hours used per bargaining unit employee on union matters during fiscal 2009, however, decreased slightly from fiscal 2008. “Official time costs represented less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the civilian personnel budget for federal civil service bargaining unit employees,” Timothy Curry, deputy associate director of partnership and labor relations at OPM, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and Labor Policy.

“The dollars spent on official time are minuscule compared to the money saved by having a mechanism in place to resolve disputes in a nonadversarial way and promote cooperative labor-management efforts to increase productivity, improve customer service and reduce the costs of doing business,” National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley said in submitted testimony.

Both the above arguments avoid the question of why taxpayers should subsidize union activities at all.

Curry’s focus on official time’s share of the budget is a moot point. If an activity is not a government function, it shouldn’t get government funding, no matter how relatively small its cost.

Kelley ignores the fact that the federal government already has “a mechanism in place to resolve disputes in a nonadversarial way” that doesn’t require unionization: the civil service system.

So why does this subsidy of union activity go on?

Part of the problem stems from inconsistent reporting. Although employees have used official time for certain union activities for decades, OPM has published reports tracking hours and costs regularly only since fiscal 2002. OPM has worked with agencies to collect the data, but the fiscal 2009 data was just released earlier this month after congressional requests. Curry said the fiscal 2010 report would be available by the end of the year. Ross plans to introduce a bill that would require OPM to submit an annual report on official time no later than March of each calendar year.

Indeed, as CEI’s F. Vincent Vernuccio, who testified at yesterday’s hearing noted:

OPM’s acknowledgment of its not being required to publish the report clearly indicates that at the agency could  discontinue it at its discretion. The need for the report is twofold.

First, taxpayers should be able to know how many of their tax dollars are going to fund official time.

Second, required reporting of official time will allow federal employees to hold their agencies accountable. As OPM rightly notes, “Annual reporting on official time was initiated by OPM to reinforce accountability on the part of both labor and management.”

Congress should also specify the time and manner of the official time report’s publication.

For Vernuccio’s full testimony, see here.

Government Unions Buying More Power

by Vincent Vernuccio on October 25, 2010

in Labor

Yesterday The Washington Examiner showed how public sector unions are buying their power though campaign donations. In their excellent editorial “Public employee unions versus working Americans,” the Examiner contrasts the grassroots movement of the Tea Party with the big money interests of government employee unions. It also shows the hypocrisy of President Obama going after (with false allegations) so called shadowy, unnamed “foreign interests,” while much of the money on the left comes from unions fighting for larger and more expensive government at taxpayers’ expense.

With the 2010 midterm congressional election campaign entering its final week, the fundamental divide in American politics has rarely been defined with more raw clarity than it is now.

On the one side are voters representing a vibrant private sector that creates jobs, builds prosperity and throbs with opportunity. Here are found the Tea Party movement, most congressional Republicans and a few of their Democratic colleagues, millions of independent voters, Main Street and small-business associations, and, increasingly, seniors. The other side is led by government employee unions who take from the private sector to further enrich and empower themselves and their political allies, including President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the Democratic majority that has controlled both chambers in Congress since 2007. The unions’ supporting cast includes radical Big Green environmentalists, trial lawyers, most precincts of the mainstream media, and college professors.

Obama and company have been on a demagogic spree in recent weeks, attacking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a host of shadowy, unnamed “foreign interests” for allegedly pumping millions of anonymous dollars into U.S. politics to buy the election. The charge is demonstrably false, but that doesn’t prevent its endless repetition. On Friday, however, we learned courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that the biggest political spending in 2010 is by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME will have funneled an estimated $87.5 million into the campaign by Nov. 2, all of it going to Democrats and an amount far exceeding the chamber’s $75 million. More millions are being poured into Democratic campaign coffers by other public-sector unions. On Friday, for example, the National Education Association spent $500,000 on ads aimed at helping Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak defeat former Rep. Pat Toomey, the Republican in the Pennsylvania Senate contest.

But there is a fundamental problem here that FDR understood years ago and that AFSCME President Gerald McEntee inadvertently highlighted when he told the Journal: “We’re spending big. And we’re damn happy it’s big. And our members are damn happy it’s big — it’s their money.” Actually, it’s not simply “their money.” Every dollar paid to a unionized government worker was taxed away from somebody who earned it in the private sector. So when these unions spend millions to elect Democrats who will vote for bigger government, they are literally using money from the productive part of America to enable more government taxing and spending. FDR might well have had this inconvenient fact in mind when he wrote in 1937 that “meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government … the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

The interests of government employee unions are inextricably opposed to the public interest. It’s time campaign finance law recognized this truth.

New Study on How Government Employee Unions Squeeze Public Budgets

by Ivan Osorio on September 28, 2009

in Economy, Features, Labor, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Remember the California budget debacle? Now it seems like not a month goes by without another state facing a budget crisis. Now it’s Michigan’s turn. Predictably, state politicians are trying to scare the public with talk of cutting funding for libraries and prisons, in order to make tax increases an easier sell. Also predictably, policy makers appear to be avoiding looking for budget savings where substantial ones could be realized: government payrolls. As The Detroit News points out:

Employee pay and benefits make up one of the biggest costs of state government. Michigan had 52,769 workers as of March and a state classified payroll of $4.73 billion for fiscal year 2007-08. When the auto industry was larger, Michiganians were among the top 20 states in per-capita income. But that income has declined to 11 percent below the national average. The state with the nation’s worst unemployment rate can no longer afford to pay above-average compensation. Michigan state workers earn 6 percent more than the national average in salary and benefits, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Michigan private-sector workers make 29 percent less than the national average for state workers.

As in other states, government employee unions oppose cuts that would affect their members. All unions do this, but public sector unions are different in that they don’t have to fear putting their employer — government — out of business, so they can ratchet up demands, which are fulfilled at taxpayer expense, to a much greater extent than private sector unions generally are able to. The upward spiraling public sector pay and benefits that result from this can wreak havoc on public finances.

For an in-depth analysis of the effect of the widespread unionizaiton of government employees, see the new Cato Institute Policy Analysis, “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Representative Government,” co-authored by University of South Florida economics professor Don Bellante, David Denholm of the Public Service Research Foundation, and myself.