Investigation: To Unions, Organizing Time Is Fine When It’s on the Taxpayers’ Dime
By Ben Weingarten
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Investigation by Ben Weingarten originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Randi Weingarten, the powerful president of the American Federation of Teachers, hasn’t been a working teacher in more than a quarter of a century.
Of the six years she spent teaching social studies, half of them appear to have been as a substitute. Yet despite the long absence from her short tenure in the classroom, the union leader described herself during a recent congressional hearing as being on leave from Brooklyn’s Clara Barton High School.
Through her decades of union activism, Weingarten has clocked service time as a public school teacher, enabling her to accrue an educators’ pension on top of the more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits she earns as a labor executive, according to records obtained by the Freedom Foundation. She would receive about $230,000 total over her first 15 years of retirement, according to the public sector union watchdog’s analysis.
Weingarten has called that analysis “completely wrong,” without explaining why. She did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ request, via the American Federation of Teachers’ press office, to clarify where the Freedom Foundation erred.
Weingarten’s work arrangement is not uncommon among public sector employees, thanks to a little-scrutinized feature often found in collective bargaining agreements: so-called “official time” or “release time” provisions. Such clauses enable employees to engage in union-related activities full- or part-time during their working hours, while sometimes continuing to earn salary and/or accrue benefits.
The practice is also common in the private sector, where many companies pay employees doing union business, according to Peter A. List, editor of LaborUnionNews.com.
But critics argue release time for public employees is different for two main reasons. First, it is taxpayers, rather than shareholders, who are picking up the cost. Second, because unions don’t have to pay many representatives, this frees up money for political activities which some taxpayers do not support.
Across the federal government, official time diverts more than $100 million in public funds toward union work annually. Combining the cost of release time at the state and local levels, one estimate puts the total bill for public sector union activities as high as $1 billion.
Proponents of these arrangements say they provide bang for the taxpayers’ buck.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest public sector union, argues that by fostering labor-management collaboration, official time “reduces employee turnover, improves customer service, [and] prevents costly litigation,” contributing to “[g]ains in quality, productivity, and efficiency –year after year, in department after department.”
In congressional testimony, Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, said that by “establishing vehicles for communications, grievance-airing, and conflict resolution, this paid time … aid[s] in agency operations.”
Critics contend these provisions create a costly and potentially unconstitutional publicly funded benefit for unions – without providing any labor “peace dividend.” James Sherk, a labor expert in the Trump administration who helped lead its efforts to curtail federal official time, told RCI that the practice creates an “enormous taxpayer subsidy to government unions,” forcing the public to “pick up a large share of the unions’ basic operating expenses,” while “freeing up resources for them to spend on politics and lobbying.”
Sherk disputes the idea that official time makes for more harmonious government, claiming that on the contrary “it encourages unions to drag out negotiations and file frivolous grievances because they don’t have to pay for it.”
A Trump administrative executive order taking aim at official time noted that “many agencies and collective bargaining representatives spend years renegotiating CBAs [collective bargaining agreements].”
Read the entire investigation here.
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Investigation by Ben Weingarten – This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
