Federal Labor Relations: Official Time Used for Union Activities
(Testimony, 09/11/96, GAO/T-GGD-96-191).

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the charging of
official time for federal workers' union activities. GAO noted that: (1)
59 percent of federal employees are represented by unions at four
agencies; (2) the use of official time for union activities is a
widely-established practice in the federal government, but it is limited
to noninternal union business; (3) union stewards and employees involved
in grievance proceedings and union representatives attending certain
management and negotiation meetings may charge official time for these
union activities; (4) the total amount and cost of official time used
for union activities and the number of employees using such time is not
known because agencies do not collect such data; (5) for fiscal year
1995, the Postal Service reported 1.7 million hours of official time
charges, the Social Security Administration reported 404,000 hours, and
the Internal Revenue Service reported 527,000 hours, but the reported
data were not uniform or complete; (6) two agencies' estimated official
time costs totalled $11 million and about $29 million, respectively; (7)
the Department of Veterans Affairs does not have a reporting system that
collects official time data; and (8) federal agencies are not required
to generate or report comprehensive data on their support of union
activities.

--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------

 REPORTNUM:  T-GGD-96-191
     TITLE:  Federal Labor Relations: Official Time Used for Union 
             Activities
      DATE:  09/11/96
   SUBJECT:  Attendance records
             Government employee unions
             Labor-management relations
             Data collection operations
             Labor negotiations
             Federal employees
             Human resources utilization
             Payroll systems
             Accounting procedures
             Collective bargaining

             
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Cover
================================================================ COVER


Before the Subcommittee on Civil Service, Committee on
Government Reform and Oversight, House of Representatives

For Release on Delivery
Expected
at 11:00 a.m.  EDT
Wednesday
September 11, 1996

FEDERAL LABOR RELATIONS - OFFICIAL
TIME USED FOR UNION ACTIVITIES

Statement by
Timothy P.  Bowling
Associate Director
Federal Management and Workforce Issues
General Government Division

GAO/T-GGD-96-191

GAO/GGD-96-191T


(410039)


Abbreviations
=============================================================== ABBREV

  EEO - Equal Employment Opportunity
  CSRA - Civil Service Reform Act
  FLRA - Federal Labor Relations Authority
  FPCA - Federal Personnel and Compensation Division
  HEHS - Health, Education and Human Services Division
  IRS - Internal Revenue Service
  OPM - Office of Personnel Management
  SSA - Social Security Administration

FEDERAL LABOR RELATIONS:  OFFICIAL
TIME USED FOR UNION ACTIVITES
==================================================== Chapter Statement

Mr.  Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee: 

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the charging of official
time for federal workers' union activities.\1 Almost 1.9 million
federal workers are represented by unions--about 750,000 employees of
the Postal Service and about 1.1 million nonpostal workers.  This
Subcommittee has expressed interest in the extent to which employees
use official time for union activities.  We found that the four major
federal entities we examined neither collect nor report the kinds of
data needed to accurately portray the practice across agencies. 

I would like to discuss three main points: 

  -- The use of official time for union activities is an established
     practice in the federal government. 

  -- The total amount of official time used for union activities, the
     cost of that time, and the number of people using that time are
     unknown. 

  -- No reporting requirement exists for agencies to generate
     comprehensive data on their support of union activities. 

You have raised the question of the extent to which federal taxpayers
subsidize the activities of federal employee unions.  Based on our
findings at the four entities we examined, the question cannot be
answered with any precision.  Decisionmakers could more readily
address the question if better data existed on (1) the amount and
cost of the hours used for union activities, as well as the number of
employees using those hours; (2) the types of activities covered by
the hours used; and (3) the overall costs of agencies' support for
union activities.  We recognize that data gathering and reporting can
be expensive, and expect that decisionmakers would need to balance
the potential costs and benefits of the various options for doing so. 

As you requested, we looked at four entities:  the Postal Service,
the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS), and the Social Security Administration (SSA).  As you know,
Mr.  Chairman, we are currently involved in a broader examination of
these issues at your request.  Because that work is in its
preliminary stages, I will talk today primarily about information we
developed in earlier work in response to a request from the Chairman,
Subcommittee on Social Security, House Committee on Ways and Means. 
In performing this review, we met with union and management officials
at Postal Service, VA, and IRS headquarters; we also interviewed
officials at seven field facilities.\2 At these entities, we gathered
readily available data on the amount of official time charged to
union activities and the cost of that time.  Our work at SSA was
somewhat more extensive than at these entities.  We interviewed union
and management officials at SSA headquarters and at 4 of SSA's 10
regional offices.  We conducted a limited verification of time
captured in SSA's national reporting system at one SSA region and at
several headquarters components.  As part of our work at SSA, we also
(1) identified the total number of union representatives at SSA
authorized to spend time on union activities, (2) identified the
number of representatives who spent at least 75 percent of their time
on union activities, and (3) estimated the cost of time charged to
union activities.\3

The employees represented by unions at these four entities--the
Postal Service, VA, IRS, and SSA--make up about 59 percent of all
federal workers who are represented by unions and are part of
collective bargaining units.  One caution regarding our findings: 
although more than half of the federal employees who are represented
by unions work at the four entities we examined, we cannot
extrapolate the limited data we were able to obtain to the government
as a whole.  The methodological reasons for this will be made clearer
as I relate our findings to you. 


--------------------
\1 "Official time" means time granted an employee by an agency to
perform certain union activities when the employee would otherwise be
in a duty status.  Union activities for which official time is
granted are generally included in those "representational functions"
undertaken by an employee on behalf of another employee pursuant to
statute, regulation, executive order, or the terms of a collective
bargaining agreement.  In addition to union activities,
representational functions generally are understood to include such
other activities as certain health and safety matters, prevailing
wage appeals, and EEO complaints. 

\2 We interviewed officials at three Postal Service, two VA, and two
IRS field facilities. 

\3 For more detailed information on SSA, a history of union activity
in the federal government, and a discussion of union costs in private
industry, see Social Security:  Union Activity at the Social Security
Administration (GAO/T-HEHS-96-150, Jun.  4, 1996). 


   THE USE OF OFFICIAL TIME FOR
   UNION ACTIVITIES IS AN
   ESTABLISHED PRACTICE IN THE
   FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
-------------------------------------------------- Chapter Statement:1

The use of official time for union activities is a widely-established
practice in the federal government.  Both in the Postal Service--an
independent establishment of the executive branch that uses almost no
appropriated funds--and in other federal agencies that do use
taxpayer money, a legal basis exists for using agency resources to
pay costs associated with union activities. 

Labor-management relations in the Postal Service are governed by the
Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which brought postal labor
relations into a framework similar to that of private-sector firms.\4
At the Postal Service, policies governing the charging of official
time to union activities are a matter subject to collective
bargaining. 

Among nonpostal federal agencies, labor-management relations are
governed by title VII of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978
(CSRA).\5 CSRA allows nonpostal federal employees to bargain
collectively through labor organizations of their choice and thereby
participate with agency management in the development of personnel
policies and practices and other decisions that affect their working
lives.  Title VII of CSRA is administered by the Federal Labor
Relations Authority (FLRA), an organization led by a three-member
panel that issues policy decisions and adjudicates labor-management
disputes. 

Official time for collective bargaining and FLRA-authorized
activities is provided as a matter of statutory right.  Official time
for other purposes is negotiated.  CSRA allows official time to be
negotiated in any amount the agency and the union involved agree to
be reasonable, necessary, and in the public interest.  However, the
act specifies that activities that relate to internal union business,
such as the solicitation of members or the election of union
officials, must be performed when in a nonduty status, that is, not
on official time. 

Ten unions have national collective bargaining agreements with the
entities we examined--four with the Postal Service, four with VA, one
with IRS, and one with SSA.  Our review of these collective
bargaining agreements, or contracts, revealed a wide range of union
activities for which official time might be charged.  Although the
specifics of the 10 contracts varied, some of the categories of
employees authorized to charge official time to union activities, as
well as the specific activities covered, were as follows:\6

  -- Union stewards, employees filing grievances, and witnesses may
     charge time spent involved in grievance procedures. 

  -- Union representatives may charge time spent attending meetings
     called by management concerning the collective bargaining
     agreement; joint labor-management committee meetings addressing
     specific issues, such as safety and health; semiannual
     labor-management relations committee meetings; and
     union-sponsored training and other training sessions pertaining
     to labor relations. 

  -- Union representatives may charge time spent on participating in
     discussions regarding personnel policies or practices or
     conditions of employment; on national-level negotiations, as
     well as on preparing for the negotiations; on local-level
     negotiations; and on new-employee orientation. 

  -- Employees may charge time spent meeting with their union
     representatives regarding grievances, appeals, or personal
     matters. 

Under some contracts, official time is authorized for travel to and
from the kinds of meetings mentioned above; under others, official
time for travel is either specifically denied or not mentioned. 

On October 1, 1993, Executive Order 12871 articulated a new vision of
labor-management relations, referred to as "partnerships." The
partnership concept may have implications for the extent of official
time spent on union-related activities.\7 However, we could not
determine the amount of official time actually used for partnership
activities at the four federal entities we examined.\8


--------------------
\4 Public Law 91-375, August 12, 1970. 

\5 Public Law 95-454, 5 U.S.C.  7101 et seq.  CSRA codified practices
on the use of official time that were previously authorized by
executive order. 

\6 This list is not comprehensive.  Nor do all of the types of
authorized employees and activities listed here appear in all ten of
the collective bargaining agreements we reviewed. 

\7 For a brief discussion of these implications at SSA in particular,
see the statement on "Use of the Trust Funds for Union Activities,"
given by the Commissioner of Social Security before the House
Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Social Security, on July
27, 1996. 

\8 As an independent executive branch establishment, the U.S.  Postal
Service is not subject to the provisions of the executive order. 
However, in addition to the 1.7 million hours charged to union
activities in fiscal year 1995, the Postal Service also paid for time
spent on employee involvement programs similar to other entities'
partnership activities.  Unlike other "union activities" at the
Postal Service, employee involvement programs were not mandated by
statute, regulation, executive order, or collective bargaining
agreements. 


   THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF OFFICIAL
   TIME USED FOR UNION ACTIVITIES,
   THE COST OF THAT TIME, AND THE
   NUMBER OF PEOPLE USING THAT
   TIME ARE UNKNOWN
-------------------------------------------------- Chapter Statement:2

We know that using official time for various union activities is an
established practice at the four entities we examined, and we can
report certain relevant statistics that each of these entities made
available to us, but we found that these statistics are limited in
what they tell us.  Within these entities, insufficient data exist on
the amount of official time used for union activities, the cost of
the time, and the number of people using that time to draw broad
conclusions.  Nor can we legitimately compare one agency's figures
with another's, or extrapolate to the larger federal universe.  The
reason for this becomes apparent when we compare the kinds of
information reported by the entities we reviewed. 

For fiscal year 1995, the Postal Service reported official time
charges for union activities of 1.7 million hours.  Also for fiscal
year 1995, SSA reported time charges of 404,000 hours, and IRS
reported 527,000 hours.  No departmentwide data were available from
VA, which lacks any reporting system that would have captured the
hours used throughout the department.  But even among the three
entities that did have reporting systems, the systems themselves--and
the types of activities they included in the reported hours--differed
from one agency to the next.  Therefore, the figures these entities
reported were not comparable. 



                                     Table 1
                     
                          Official Time Charged to Union
                     Activities, Cost of the Time, and Number
                        of People Charging Time by Agency

                 Number of
                 employees
            represented by
               unions with  Agency-reported                     Number of
                  national  hours charged to  Cost of the time  employees
                collective  union activities  charged to union  authorized to
                bargaining  in fiscal year    activities (in    charge time to
Agency          agreements  1995              millions)         union activities
--------  ----------------  ----------------  ----------------  ----------------
Postal             751,000  1,744,000         $29.2\a           Unknown
Service



Veterans           165,000  Unknown           Unknown           Unknown
Affairs\
b



Internal            97,000  527,000\          Unknown           Unknown
Revenue
Service



Social              52,000  404,000\c         $11.4\d           1,800\e
Security
Administ
ration
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\a The $29.2 million cost associated with the number of hours charged
to union activities included only direct salaries. 

\b VA did not have a time-reporting system that would provide the
total number of hours used for union activities, the cost of the
hours, or the number of employees using time for union activities for
the Department. 

\c SSA reported that its employees charged 404,000 hours to union
activities in fiscal year 1995.  We found these charges to be
underreported by at least 9,000 hours, bringing the total to at least
413,000 hours. 

\d SSA provided Congress with an annual estimate totaling $11 million
for union activities expenses in fiscal year 1995.  We estimated the
cost of the hours charged to union activities, including both direct
salaries and benefits, to be $11.4 million.  As agreed with your
staff, we did not attempt to make this estimate at the other three
entities we examined. 

\e At a minimum, 146 union representatives spent at least 75 percent
of their "on-the-clock" time on union activities.  However, we
identified about 1,800 union representatives authorized to charge
time to union activities. 

Source:  Unverified data provided by the agencies and our analysis. 

The Postal Service, for example, reported 1,744,000 hours charged by
union stewards for union activities in fiscal year 1995.  But these
hours--entailing, by Postal Service calculation, over $29 million in
direct salaries--covered only time spent by union stewards in trying
to resolve grievances in the early stages.\9 The hours reported by
the Postal Service did not include substantial additional time spent
on other union activities that was paid for by the Postal Service. 
For example, the Postal Service paid for union representatives' time
spent on unfair labor practice charges--commonly a major focus of
labor-management activity--but did not include these hours in
reported time charges. 

As I previously mentioned, SSA reported that its employees charged
404,000 hours to union activities in fiscal year 1995.  However, in
attempting to verify these charges, we found them to be underreported
by at least 9,000 hours (or 2 percent), bringing the total to at
least 413,000 hours.  SSA has no formal system for routinely
calculating and reporting the costs of union activity, although it
does provide annual estimates of the expenses for union activities to
Congress.\10 We estimated the cost of the time spent on union
activities in calendar year 1995 at SSA to be about $11.4 million,
based on an estimated total of 413,000 hours and on the salaries and
estimated benefits of the union representatives.  Regarding the total
number of SSA union representatives who were authorized to spend time
on union activities, the agency estimated the figure to be about
1,600.  Our count, based on our identification of these personnel at
the local SSA level, was about 1,800, or roughly 200 more than SSA's
figure. 

Of the 527,000 hours charged to union activities at IRS in fiscal
year 1995, about 348,000 hours (or 66 percent of the total) involved
time spent by employees who were participating on behalf of the union
in meetings called by agency management.  The remaining 179,000 hours
(or 34 percent) covered all other union-related activities, including
grievance resolution.  IRS officials told us that they did not
calculate salary costs based on the hours charged and could not
provide information on the number of union representatives charging
official time to union activities. 

Based on the findings I have just related, it is apparent that the
reporting systems of all of the entities we examined had substantial
limitations.  VA, as I stated earlier, had no system at all at the
departmental level.  We visited two VA field facilities; one had a
reporting system to capture official time charged to union
activities, and the other did not.  We found SSA's national system
for capturing and reporting time spent on union activities was
comprised of two component systems--one an automated system and the
other a less-accurate manual one.\11 The reporting procedures at the
IRS regional offices we visited varied from one unit to the next. 
None of the systems at any of the entities we examined was designed
to capture the hours spent by management or other employees on
union-related matters, to report the number or names of individuals
charging official time, or to identify all of the costs of the
agency's support of union activities. 


--------------------
\9 The Postal Service procedure for resolving grievances is a 4- or
5-step procedure, involving progressively lower to higher level union
and management officials, with the final step involving outside
binding arbitration.  In this context, the term "early stages"
indicates that the grievance was in step 1 or 2--still informal or at
the field facility level. 

\10 SSA's estimates of union costs increased from $6 million to $11
million between fiscal years 1993 and 1995. 

\11 The underreporting of official time charges we discovered at SSA
took place primarily in SSA's manual system, and resulted from
inaccurate reporting from source documents, overlooked reports for
some union representatives, and uncounted reports for some
organizational units during certain reporting periods. 


   NO REPORTING REQUIREMENT EXISTS
   FOR AGENCIES TO GENERATE
   COMPREHENSIVE DATA ON THEIR
   SUPPORT OF UNION ACTIVITIES
-------------------------------------------------- Chapter Statement:3

One reason for this inconsistent pattern of reporting is that--as
Office of Personnel Management (OPM) officials told us--there is
currently no governmentwide requirement to gather data on, or report
the amount of time federal employees use for, union activities.  It
is not surprising, therefore, that the time-reporting systems at the
four entities we examined had substantial limitations. 

In a 1979 report, we recommended that OPM (1) clarify its
recordkeeping requirements then in effect for capturing time spent on
representational functions (mainly union activities) and (2) direct
agencies to comply with those requirements.\12 Even though guidance
at the time required federal agencies to keep records on official
time used for representational functions, 18 of the 26 units we
surveyed at four agencies did not.\13 We recommended that OPM require
agencies to submit annual reports on official time used for
representational functions, envisioning that such reports "could
assist OPM in evaluating Federal labor-management relations
activities."

Following our report, in 1981, OPM issued Federal Personnel Manual
Letter 711-161.  The letter required that, no later than January 1,
1982, federal agencies activate a recordkeeping system to capture
official time charges to representational functions.  But the letter
did not require agencies to report the yearly time charges to OPM, as
we had recommended.  As a result, OPM never consolidated the amount
of time charged governmentwide to union activities and has no
information on agencies' compliance with the recordkeeping
requirement.  When the Federal Personnel Manual was abolished in
1994, all recordkeeping requirements regarding time spent on union
activities were rescinded. 


--------------------
\12 Inadequate Recordkeeping on Official Time Used for
Representational Functions (GAO-FPCD-79-77, Sept.  17, 1979). 

\13 We included the following four agencies in our 1979 review of
recordkeeping of official time used for representational functions: 
the Departments of Transportation; Health, Education, and Welfare;
Labor; and OPM. 


------------------------------------------------ Chapter Statement:3.1

In summary, Mr.  Chairman, we found limitations in recordkeeping and
reporting among the four entities we examined.  We also found that no
reporting requirement exists to ensure that agencies generate
comprehensive data on their support of union activities.  If
decisionmakers hope to resolve the question of the extent to which
federal taxpayers subsidize the activities of federal employee
unions, better data are needed on (1) the amount and cost of the
hours used for union activities, as well as the number of employees
using those hours; (2) the types of activities covered by the hours
used; and (3) the overall costs of agencies' support for union
activities.  Recognizing that data gathering can be expensive, we
believe that decisionmakers would need to balance the costs and
benefits of the various options for doing so. 

Mr.  Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement.  I would be
pleased to answer any questions that you or other Members of the
Subcommittee may wish to ask. 

*** End of document. ***