Official time as a form of union security in federal sector labor-management relations

Air Force Law Review, Spring, 2007 by Kenneth Bullock

4. Fee for Service

Occasionally unions have attempted to circumvent state and federal prohibitions on coerced dues payments by attempting to charge employees for particular services. Unions frequently seek to obtain nonmember reimbursement for expensive services, such as arbitration.

Fee-for-service arrangements are less coercive than those discussed above, because payment of the fee is not a condition of employment, but merely a condition of access to the union's services. Unfortunately for the unions, the NLRB and the Federal Labor Relations Authority have consistently held that requiring nonmembers to pay fees or expenses for access to the contractual grievance and arbitration process was a violation of the exclusive representative's duty of fair representation. (22)

5. Maintenance of Membership

Under a maintenance-of-membership clause, employees are not required to join the union, but they are required to maintain their membership once they have elected to join, usually for a fixed period or for the life of the existing contract. Maintenance of membership prevents employees from opportunistically joining and then resigning from the union based on the individual's short-term needs. Maintenance of membership is very common in the public sector, (23) but it is rare in the private sector (due to the prevalence of the union shop and the agency shop), (24) and it is prohibited in the federal government. (25)

6. Dues Withholding ("Checkoff")

Automatic dues check-off is a limited but important form of union security in which the employer agrees to automatically deduct dues from consenting employees' paychecks each pay period and forward the funds to the union. Many union contracts require the union to pay a small administrative fee to the employer for each dues deduction, but some unions have negotiated dues check-off provisions that cost them nothing. Under the NLRA, contracts may allow employees to rescind their authorizations only at specified intervals of no more than a year, or the life of the current contract. (26) When such provisions are used, the dues check-off becomes a substitute for a maintenance of membership agreement. Automatic dues check-off is a great boon to union officials, since it relieves them of the time-consuming duty of collecting dues while ensuring a steady stream of funds. Dues check-off appears in the overwhelming majority of private and public labor contracts, (27) and federal-sector agencies are required by statute to provide it (free of administrative charges) to any exclusive bargaining representative. (28)

7. Leave for Representational Activities

Time off for representational activities is not usually discussed as a form of union security, but it serves many of the same purposes, since it provides an important form of support and stability for the exclusive bargaining representative. As this article will show, low rates of union membership have made official time the most important form of union security in the federal sector.