GOP-sponsored bills over many years have sought to abolish it outright or to effectively abolish official time by charging unions for the time value. Image: NaMong Productions92/Shutterstock.com
The latest report on use of official time by federal employees (see related story) marks the latest in a long back and forth over federal employees using on the clock time for certain union purposes.
Federal employee unions see official time—which is authorized in law although amounts are subject to negotiation in each contract—as a tradeoff for the requirement that they represent all employees in a bargaining unit, even those who don’t pay dues.
However, official time has long been a target of Republicans in Congress and Republican administrations. For example, while the new OPM report acknowledges that law, it says that there is no “comprehensive evidence that these provisions support an effective and efficient government in all instances.”
“Large amounts of official time allocated to agency employees conducting activities on behalf of unions have resulted in widespread diversion of resources from agency mission-critical functions. In many cases, where agency union representatives serve as full-time union officials, agencies are no longer able to rely on employees even for a portion of their duty time, to complete the duties of the positions for which they were hired,” it says.
GOP-sponsored bills over many years have sought to abolish it outright or to effectively abolish it by charging unions for the value of the time. In several orders—not fully carried out during its time—the first Trump administration called for reducing the amounts and allowable uses. And as a means of calling more attention to official time, it also started calling it “taxpayer-funded union time” and required more specific reports than in the past.
The Biden administration quickly revoked those orders, stopped compiling the reports and removed the prior ones from the OPM site. The second Trump administration quickly returned to the issue, with a February order requiring agencies to again report data that make up the new report.
While the orders from the first Trump term have not been reissued, discontinuing official time is one of the impacts of this year’s orders to revoke union representation at some two dozen agencies. (Those orders are the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one in which a federal judge recently blocked their application to locals of eight unions in four agencies.)
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