Taxpayers Funding Big Labor No-Show Jobs at Obama’s DOJ

Taxpayer Paid No-Show Jobs

From the Washington Examiner:  Twenty-six Immigration Court judges who are paid as government employees also spend a lot of their working hours at the Department of Justice, taking care of business for their federal employee union — the $165,000-a-year judges are on the federal payroll under the government’s “official time” program, which enables them to do work for their union while hearing cases in the heavily backlogged system.

They are among 4,000 Justice Department employees who were on official time over the past four years, including 200 [essentially no-show government jobs] who spend 40 hours a week on union matters, according to official documents and data obtained by the Washington Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act.

The department refused to disclose the names of federal employees in data provided to the Examiner.

By comparison, the AFL-CIO, which has 11 million members, employs 459 people in its national headquarters.

Justice Department employees drew $23 million in wages for 760,000 hours of union work — about 190,000 hours annually — under official time between 2009 and 2013. Other expenses, such as union-related travel and office supplies, are also paid by taxpayers.

Earlier this year, the Examiner’s “Too Big to Manage” series looked at official time across the government and found civil servants such as Phil Barbarello, who earns $166,000 a year at the Federal Aviation Administration, but spends all of his time working as a union vice president.