Dan Bishop Introduces Bill to Stop Spending Tax Dollars on Union Activities

National Right to Work President applauds legislation to make government employees do their actual jobs while on the clock.

Washington, D.C. (March 16, 2021) Today, Rep. Dan Bishop (NC-9) introduced the Do Your Job Act of 2021 in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This legislation would ensure that public employees do the jobs the taxpayers are paying them to do by putting an end to the practice of union “official time” throughout the federal workforce.

Under official time, union officials in the federal workforce have been allowed to conduct union business while “on the clock.” This means that every year, millions of taxpayer dollars are used to pay for union activity instead of the public services that those dollars are intended for.

This problem traces back to 1978, when President Jimmy Carter signed the Civil Service Reform Act. That bill, among other things, contained a provision that explicitly authorized the use of official time by federal employees.

According to an Office of Personnel Management report, official time can be used for, among other things:

• “Lobbying Congress concerning pending or desired legislation affecting bargaining unit employees (e.g. bills on Federal pay and benefits, etc.)”
• “Allowing certain employees to spend 100 percent of their time handling union representation functions while being paid by Federal agencies”

Union officials chalked up a staggering 2,606,390 hours of official time in 2019, at a cost to taxpayers of over $163 million in payroll and other costs alone for just that one year.

Waste like this can have tangible, real-life consequences. For instance, money wasted on official time spent by Social Security Administration union leaders in 2019 alone could have paid for the processing of 135,000 backlogged retirement applications or 17,000 more disability determinations.

National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix lauded Congressman Bishop’s introduction of the bill.
“This bill will end the outrageous payment of tax dollars to union officials pretending to be government employees,” Mix declared.

“Labor unions are private organizations pursuing their own interests — not taxpayers’ interests. As such, Big Labor should have no more influence over government policy than any other private entity. They certainly shouldn’t be collecting government paychecks for non-government work.”

The National Right to Work Committee, established in 1955, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, single-purpose citizens’ organization dedicated to the principle that all Americans must have the right to join a union if they choose to, but none should ever be forced to affiliate with a union in order to get or keep a job. Its web address is NRTWC.org