The House has made another move to apply more scrutiny to the use of official time—on the clock time by federal employees used for certain union-related duties—with language affecting the IRS in the financial services-general government appropriations bill approved by that chamber.
There have been numerous proposals in recent years to restrict or even eliminate the practice—which unions consider a tradeoff for their responsibility to represent all employees in a bargaining unit regardless of whether they are dues-paying members—but those have made relatively little progress. Instead, efforts lately have focused on tracking use of the time. OPM used to put out annual reports on official time across government but hasn’t done so since one covering 2011.
In its report on the spending bill (HR-5016) the House says that “labor and management have a shared responsibility to ensure that official time is authorized and used appropriately for the ultimate benefit of the American people.”
It orders a report to be delivered to Congress within 90 days of the bill’s enactment specifying the total number of IRS bargaining unit employees, the number of them who use official time, the number of hours of official time, the number of official time hours used per bargaining unit employee, the number of employees, if any, who use official time 100 percent of the time, and official time wage costs for fiscal years 2011-2014, including the year-over-year percentage change and a description of how the official time program unit monitors official time for compliance with the bargaining agreement on behalf of labor and management.
