A GAO report on use of “official time” by federal employees for union duties could reignite efforts to restrict or even repeal that authority in the new Congress when Republicans will control both chambers.
House Republicans have targeted the issue for years, arguing that all working time should be spent on official duties, while Democrats generally have sided with the union view that official time is a long-running provision of law designed to compensate unions for their lack of a closed shop, a situation in which paying dues is not mandatory but the union responsibility to represent all bargaining unit members is.
With little chance of passing restrictions, official time opponents in more recent years have focused on getting a fuller accounting of the value of the employees’ time that is involved, and in particular an assessment of how many employees substantial amounts of their on the job time, or all of it, on union duties.
While annual OPM reports on official time have not addressed that issue for many years, the GAO report—requested by the top Republicans on the House and Senate committees dealing with federal employee issues—did. In a sample of 10 agencies that account for about half of official time usage government-wide, it found that nearly worked on union duties full-time. In addition, about another 300 did such work at least half the time.
OPM’s most recent report said that during fiscal 2012, unions represented 1,222,537 non-postal bargaining unit employees, an increase of 1.65 compared to FY 2011. The number of hours rose to 3,439,449 from 3,395,187, but the hours per employee fell from 2.82 to 2.81. OPM estimated the cost at $157,196,468.
GAO also questioned the method OPM uses to estimate the cost of official time, which multiplies each agency’s average cost of salary and benefits per hour by the number of hours used there. GAO said that an estimate using the actual salary of employees who charge for official time produced a result about 10 percent higher in a sample it conducted.
The report is here: http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666619.pdf
