‘Release Time’ Clause Gets Curbed
According to National Legal and Policy Center, the Arizona Court of Appeals, affirming a lower court decision, ruled that a Memorandum of Understanding forcing the City of Phoenix to compensate local cops for union activity, while not necessarily violating the state constitution’s Gift Clause, imposed grossly excessive costs.
In a must-read commentary on the decision, Carl Horowitz explains that while this was a significant, if incomplete victory, for public accountability, further pushback against release time clauses needs to spread to more courts and legislatures across the nation.
Public-sector unions are private organizations. Their activity does not serve a public purpose. While government workers have the right to form or join a labor organization, there is no reasonable justification for forcibly enlisting the general public to pay for union meetings, rallies, retreats, lobbying, get-out-the-vote drives and other partisan activity. Public-sector unions should pay for such activities out of their own pockets or, failing that, reimburse government. Yet with increasing regularity, they have persuaded their corresponding agencies to bear the costs. At the federal level, as Union Corruption Update noted at the time, a late-2012 study by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, leaked to the press, estimated that federal workers in Fiscal Year 2011 spent 3.4 million working hours conducting union business at a public cost of $155 million. These figures represented respective increases of 11 percent and 13 percent over the figures for Fiscal 2010. The situation prompted Reps. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., and Dennis Ross, R-Fla., to complain in writing to then-OPM Director John Berry. More recently, this March, Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., unveiled the Federal Employee Accountability Act (H.R. 1658) to bar unionized federal workers from engaging in collective bargaining or arbitration while on the agency clock.
It is at the state and local levels, however, where public-sector labor chieftains have gone furthest in corralling government agencies into underwriting the costs of doing union business. This March, the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a study, “A Remedy for Taxpayer Giveaway to Unions,” revealing how state and local agencies in Missouri subsidize unions during working hours without any reductions in member pay. Despite extensive noncooperation by various agencies, the author, CEI labor policy analyst Trey Kovacs, found a number of cases of this insidious form of employee double-dipping. In an interview, Kovacs expressed his disdain for what clearly had been agency-union collusion. “Union release time is a plague on local, state and federal government finances,” he said. “The practice of allowing public employees to perform union business only benefits the labor union and serves no public purpose.”
For the complete Op-Ed piece, CLICK HERE.
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