Legislation (HR-4392) offered in the House would require OPM to produce an annual report on use of official time by federal employees—on-the-clock time used for certain union-related purposes—including data on the specific purposes for which it was used.
“Unfortunately, from my time as the former chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce, I learned firsthand that the OPM has very little accountability for the use of official time by federal employees,” said sponsor Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla.
Some Republicans have targeted the practice for years, arguing that all working time should be spent on official duties; they especially object that some federal employees spend all their duty time on union matters. Democrats generally have sided with the union view that official time is a long-running provision of law designed to compensate unions for the lack of a closed shop, leaving a situation in which paying dues is not mandatory but the union responsibility to represent all bargaining unit members is.
The circumstances in which official time are set by law but the amount typically is subject to negotiation and varies among agencies, as well as within agencies over time, such as when a contract is up for renegotiation.
OPM produced reports on the practice annually for a number of years but more recently has done so only sporadically. OPM’s most recent data came in a broader report on labor-management relations in late 2014. It said that during fiscal 2012, unions represented 1,222,537 non-postal bargaining unit employees, an increase of 1.65 percent compared to fiscal 2011. The number of hours per represented employee fell slightly from 2.82 to 2.81, but was still above the 2.60 range of the prior three years. OPM estimated the cost at $157.2 million.
A GAO report that year sampled 10 agencies that account for about half of official time usage government-wide and found that nearly 400 employees worked on union duties full-time. About another 300 did such work at least half the time.
