A bill ready for a House vote (HR-4392) to require detailed annual reporting on the use of “official time” would create an administrative burden for agencies, according to Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee–although they did not argue against such an accounting in principle.
The bill represents the latest in a series of attempts, mainly by House Republicans, to better track that form of on-the-clock time that employees may spend on certain union-related duties. The bill would require annual reporting on the amount of time used, the impact on agency operations, the number of employees who used it, the number and percentage who spend 100 percent of their work hours on official time, and a description of the space used for conducting official time-related activities, including square footage.
Such bills commonly are seen as a potential prelude to attempts to curtail or even eliminate official time, which unions see as a tradeoff for the requirement that they represent all bargaining unit employees regardless of whether they pay dues.
In a report on the bill, the committee said the measure “is designed to ensure Congress, and the American public, receives specific and timely information on official time use and that such use is reasonable, necessary, and in the public interest.”
In separate comments, committee Democrats said that “reporting on some of the additional data may be difficult, costly, and burdensome for federal agencies since they currently do not track this information. For example, it is unclear whether a determination of agency impact would involve assessments of productivity, efficiency, costs, employee performance, employee engagement, working conditions, work environment, labor-management relations, workplace disputes and litigation, and quality of products and services.
“In addition, OPM’s current reporting system does not track the number of employees who use official time, and that information may require manual reporting by agencies,” and agencies could find it burdensome to describe the space used for conducting union activities, they said.
