Labor pains induced by federal unions

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 6, 1997 | by Tom Schatz, | Sean Paige

The golden age of organized labor may have passed - when union intimidators such as John L. Lewis, George Meany and Jimmy Hoffa roamed the country, casting giant shadows over corporate boardrooms - but union bosses still have plenty of pull where it counts: inside the Clinton White House. If you want to know why, just look at the president's campaign contributions, or think back on some of the ads purchased by big labor targeting freshmen House Republicans.

What have unions gained for their obeisance? One probable payoff is the strong hand federal labor unions have been given in Vice President Al Gore's reinvention effort, the National Performance Review - an arrangement codified in 1993 when President Clinton issued Executive Order The "partnership" order placed government managers and federal labor unions on equal footing and expanded the list of issues federal unions are permitted by law to bargain over.

Part of the problem thereby was entrusted to become part of the solution; the foxes, in effect, were asked to help manage the henhouse. Clinton and Gore weren't unreasonable in thinking they couldn't "reinvent" big government without the cooperation of its rank and file or playing against type in trying to appease unions that soon might be seeing a reduction in their membership rolls. But their Faustian bargain with federal unions, struck in the name of making government "work better and cost less," actually may be costing taxpayers more while reducing the productivity of the federal workforce.

Take the Social Security Administration, or SSA, as one example. There, the number of federal employees working full time on union activities has risen by more than 80 percent since 1993, from 80 individuals to 145, according to a General Accounting Office, or GAO, report, and an additional 1,800 SSA employees are authorized to spend at least some of their workday engaged in union business. Not surprisingly, the overall time SSA employees spend on union activities also has increased, from 254,000 hours in 1990 to more than 413,000 in 1995.

This "is the equivalent of paying the salaries and other expenses of about 200 SSA employees to represent the 52,000 employees in the American Federation of Government Employees bargaining unit in 1995," according to the GAO, and drained an estimated $12.6 million from Social Security last year.

Although the amount of time allocated for settling union grievances (called "bank time") has held steady since Clinton's partnership order (even as those grievances - just coincidentally? - dropped by half), time allocated for "other" union activities (called "nonbank time") has risen steeply and is expected by the GAO to climb even higher as partnership activities increase.

So what are these SSA employees spending all these nonbank hours doing? Haggling with management over the expanded list of bargainable issues or jawboning about the great reinvention that isn't. Anything but what they're paid to do.

"Of the 31 SSA field managers we interviewed, 21 said that managing day-to-day office functions is more difficult under partnership because managers have little or no control over when and how union activities are conducted," the GAO reports. "...they had trouble maintaining adequate staff levels in the office to serve walk-in traffic, answer telephones and handle routine office workloads. Additionally, 18 field managers expressed concern about the...time they spend responding to union requests for information regarding bargaining and grievances."

This state of affairs isn't unique to SSA. Last year, Postal Service employees spent an estimated 1.7 million man-hours and $29 million on union and partnership-related activities, according to the GAO. IRS workers spent 527,000 hours similarly occupied.

So what tangible results has the partnership era wrought, at least with regard to the administration's reinvention effort? The GAO says it's difficult or impossible" to verify the savings figures being touted by the White House and found that only 24 percent of NPR action items have been implemented. Those that have - such as improved landscaping around federal buildings, writing agency mission statements, posting reports on the Internet, increasing user fees and team-writing new regulations - hardly seem revolutionary. Nor have they addressed the deeper management crisis percolating within the federal government - a reign of error seemingly impervious to the union-management bull sessions, feel-good fuzziness and political payoffs of the partnership era.

Tom Schatz is president of Citizens Against Government Waste. Sean Paige is the editor of Government WasteWatch, the quarterly publication of CAGW.