Taxpayers across the nation are spending millions of dollars to pay the salaries and benefits of government employees to work exclusively for labor unions, an investigation by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute has found.
The practice is called “official time” in federal law, or “release” time in local labor agreements reviewed by the Institute. At the federal level, it cost taxpayers more than $129 million in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Similar provisions have become standard in labor agreements between unions and governments at the state and local level. Finding the total cost would require analyzing every government union contract in every state, county, city and school district in the country, a monumental task that those who have studied the issue say has not been done.
But one example exposed by the Goldwater Institute’s investigation shows the City of Phoenix spent about $3.7 million to pay its employees to do union work last fiscal year, which ended in June. Phoenix has agreements with seven unions that represent city employees, allowing them a total of more than 73,000 city-paid hours annually to do union work.
Other cities in the area have similar provisions in their contracts with labor organizations that represent municipal employees.
(Click here to read the Goldwater Institute’s full report)
“The taxpayers are getting hatcheted at multiple levels,” said Leslie Paige, vice president of policy and communication at Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., nonprofit that tracks federal spending. “The taxpayers may not even know that they are subsidizing the very people that are picking their pockets.”
The union officials who qualify for release time are government employees. But instead of showing up for their regular jobs, they are released from duty to work for the union. Labor executives defend the use of tax money to pay their salaries as a good investment that leads to a more productive government workforce.
John Gage, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in congressional testimony last June that official time has led to better relations between workers and management. That has helped resolve disputes that otherwise could have escalated into costly lawsuits or formal complaints, he said, adding that it also leads to greater efficiency and cost savings for federal agencies.
In the 2009 fiscal year, unions representing federal workers used almost 3 million hours of official time, the equivalent of more than 1,400 full-time employees, at a cost of $129.1 million.
Paying government employees to do union work has become a standard provision in state and local labor contracts, said Patrick Semmens, director of legal information at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which opposes the practice.
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Costs to taxpayers from release time go far beyond the dollars spent on salary and benefits for government workers who do not do their government jobs, said Paige. There is no pressure on the union to settle grievances or agree to concessions when their salaries are not coming out of union dues, she said. Money the unions would otherwise have to spend paying top officers also is freed up for other activities, including electioneering, when taxpayers are footing the bill for salaries and benefits, she added.
A bill to limit union release time at the federal level was introduced this year in the House of Representatives, but has gone nowhere.
Labor unions spent about $96.7 million on federal campaigns alone in the two-year cycle leading up to the 2010 election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Three of the top four labor contributors are public employee unions – the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The top contributor to federal campaigns among labor groups was the Service Employees International Union, which represents workers in both government and private-sector jobs.
James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said release time can end up shortchanging union members, as well as taxpayers. Even in the private sector, management is sometimes willing to pay top union officials if it brings concessions in pay and benefits that will apply to all workers, said Sherk, who advocated eliminating official time at the federal level during congressional testimony earlier this year.
“A lot of managers will say ‘it’s cheaper for me to put a few of them on the payroll than it is to pay the higher wages'” for everyone, Sherk said.
But at least in the private sector, there is pressure on management to control costs or face being wiped out by their competitors. That pressure does not exist in government, where there is no competition and no bottom line to protect, Sherk said.
About 12 percent of the nation’s workforce is comprised of union members, according to 2010 data compiled at Unionstats.com. About 52 percent of them work for some level of government, from federal agencies down to local school districts.
Among government employees, union membership is about 36 percent nationally, according to Unionstats.com. In the private sector, it’s about 7 percent.
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