Use of official time dropped sharply in recent years 2019 compared with the previous accounting covering 2016, OPM has reported, reflecting one of the Trump administration’s major initiatives regarding federal labor-management relations and one that federal unions see as a bid to undermine their ability to function.
Hours fell by 28 percent to 2.6 million, the average number of hours per bargaining unit employee from 2.97 to 1.96, and the salary cost attributable to official time decreased by 24 percent to $135 million.
Official time—what the administration calls “taxpayer-funded union time”—is on-the-clock time that federal employees with union roles can spend on certain union-related duties, such as negotiations and representing employees in disciplinary cases and other disputes with management.
Reducing amounts and allowable uses of official time was the focus of one of the three 2018 executive orders at the heart of many of the administration’s civil service policies, among other things telling agencies to generally not agree to allow more than one hour for each employee in a bargaining unit.
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. The unions expect that repealing all three orders will be among the early priorities of a Biden administration.
For much of the period reflected in the new report a court order, since lifted, had blocked one hour per employee provision along with many other parts of the orders. “However, we believe that agencies were mindful of the EO requirement calling for an effective and efficient government and were more effective in monitoring and tracking the use of [the time] and ensuring it was used only for authorized purposes,” OPM said.
The report further notes that more stringent practices on accounting for such time may have caused some of the decrease, and that prior reports calculated the cost according to the average salary of employees in a bargaining unit while the most recent one accounted for actual costs.
The order also called on agencies to stop prior practices of providing unions with free use of office space and access to equipment—which together with travel and other expenses agencies provide to unions amounted to nearly another $25 million, OPM said. “Agencies are expected to continue fully implementing the EO requirements and renegotiating their collective bargaining agreements at the earliest opportunity under the law,” it said.
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