Federal Employees Spent 3.4 Million Hours Working For Their Unions

New report shows workers are increasingly spending time on union tasks

Most Americans think federal employees are working for the public.

But a new report issued by the Office of Personnel Management on Monday shows that in fiscal 2012, 1.2 million federal workers spent 3.4 million hours reporting to their government unions. Paradoxically, time spent not working for the taxpayer is called “official time.”

OPM reports that official time costs taxpayers $157 million in salary and benefits, up from $129 million in 2009 and $102 million in 2006.

Taxpayers are subsidizing unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal Employees. Over 80 unions represent federal employees in agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to the Federal Trade Commission.

It is not uncommon in Washington for embarrassing information to be released well after the fact. Such is the case with the Official Time Report for Fiscal Year 2012, which was released Oct. 6 — at the start of fiscal 2015. Only after numerous requests from Phil Gingrey, a Georgia representative who has sponsored a series of bills to end official time, did OPM release the report.

The official time report comes at a time when the federal budget deficit totals half a trillion dollars. The Veterans Affairs Department paid employees $47 million to work for their unions, up from $43 million in 2011. Those funds could have been used to get medical treatment for veterans, who rightly complained that they had to wait months or years to see doctors. The Defense Department paid $13 million, enough to send some more troops to fight ISIS or Ebola, whichever President Obama deems the greater threat.

In terms of hours of official time per employee, known as the “official time rate,” the most egregious example was the National Labor Relations Board, with an average 12 hours per employee during fiscal 2012. During the last three quarters of that fiscal year, the NLRB was not doing much meaningful work, because it was operating with three illegal recess-appointed members. Every NLRB decision between January 2012 through the summer of 2013 was invalidated.

Other agencies with high official time rates were the Treasury, with seven hours per employee, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with 8 hours per employee.

Some might argue that federal employees need union representation to negotiate their salaries and conditions of employment and redress grievances. But federal union representatives cannot negotiate salaries or fringe benefits for any member. Federal employee compensation is set by law, not by union representatives. Plus, federal employees are prohibited from striking.

The report shows that only 8% of hours were used for negotiations. Seventy-seven percent of official time hours were spent on “labor management relations,” a fuzzy term whose activities include “meetings between labor and management officials to discuss general conditions of employment, labor-management committee meetings, labor relations training for union representatives, and union participation in formal meetings and investigative interviews.” The time spent on labor management relations has dramatically increased under Obama.

Republicans as well as Democrats are to blame for allowing official time to continue. In June, 60 House Republicans joined all House Democrats and voted to keep official time.

Republicans who wanted to keep official time include Steve Daines and Shelley Moore Capito, Republican representatives from Montana and West Virginia, respectively, who are on course to win Senate seats in their respective states. Despite the overwhelming backing of the Republican establishment, which spared them significant primary opposition, those representatives were happy to buck the party on union power.

Paul Broun and Steve Stockman, Republican representatives from Georgia and Texas, had just lost Senate primaries in which they claimed to be the conservative candidate. Clearly, conservatism is less important once the campaigns are over and it is time to vote.

Americans facing precarious employment prospects are being asked to pay ever-higher taxes to support growing federal programs. Is it too much to ask that federal workers spend all their time working for the American public?

This piece originally appeared in WSJ's Marketwatch

This piece originally appeared in WSJ's MarketWatch