- Jun 6, 2007
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Today's Wall Street Journal had an editorial article titled "How Public Unions Exploit the Ruse of 'Official Time'". This article was extremely biased and unfair and unfortunately represents an ideology which is prevalent in America and is wrong and dangerous! The theme of the article is that it posits that "official time" for federal employees is a huge waste in taxpayer spending and should be eliminated or dramatically curtailed; "official time" is merely time that federal employees who are also union members spend on union business. The author of the article, Mallory Factor, highlights this theme in his statement that "the Office of Personnel Management reports that federal employees spent over three million hours on official time in 2010 costing the taxpayers about $137 million in salary and benfit costs". This criticism is without merit, federal union workers have rights and union authorities who work under this classification of "official time" are merely using this time to learn about the problems facing these workers that impinge on these rights and see the affected rights are respected. These union authorities have the right and duty to do this work and the federal government as the employer of federal union workers has the duty to see these workers get their rights of good union representation which this "official time" mechanism provides. Matters concerning these workers involving scheduling, work assignments, compensation, health insurance and other issues impact these workers rights and are important thereby justifying the use federal worker union authorities spending time on them!
Mr. Factor is so uneven handed in this article it makes his position laughable! He seeks to make a big deal that as of July 2011, the Department of Homeland Security had 62 employees working full-time on union activities; what a meaningless criticism the number of work locations of DHS must number at least in the hundreds, for alone there is at least a hundred plus airports across the country which have DHS worksites, sixty-two such employees for all the varied DHS work locations is not unreasonable at all. Mr. Factor offers further support for his thesis by mentioning that in 1998 there was 946 federal employees throughout the entire federal government workforce working full-time on union activity and therefore working under this "official time" classification, this is not a very persuasive point if one considers that there probably was around 150,000 to 200,000 unionized federal workers in the total workforce at that time which produces about a 1 full-time union official to every 150 or 200 union federal workers which a reasonable person shouldn't consider out of line. To consider the extreme ends people like Mr. Factor will go to advance their anti-union agenda one need only examine the latter portion of the article where he says "47" states have "gift clauses" in their constitutions that prohibit government subsidies to private entities his meaning being that this allowing federal workers who are also union officials to work full-time on union business and still get their federal worker pay is essentially a gift from the federal government to its unions and thus should be outlawed; this logic is clearly twisted and nonsensical when an employer enters into a collective bargaining agreement the employer has a duty to see the employees rights covered by the agreement are given to them this providing of "official time" to federal worker union officials is merely part of the federal government employer fulfilling this duty pursuant to the collective bargaining agreement!
The problem with Mr. Factor is a problem that a lot of Republicans and their allies have which is they don't recognize the natural rights of workers, the rights that a person of good virtue would consider that all workers are entitled to. A perfect example of this bad ideology is this Senate candidatie Mr. Akin's response when a person recently asked him publicly if he was anti-union, he didn't say I fully support collective bargaining rights but I think union agreements should be fair to employers as well as employees, no this anti-union candidate essentially said I believe in a system where employers should be free to set the terms of employment for their employees and if an employee doesn't like those terms he is free to seek employment elsewhere. This value or ideology is so off-the-charts bad that someone who holds it should not only not be in public office he or she shouldn't even ever be able to be a candidate for public office in America; the leverage that employers have over an individual employee is enormous and dwarfs that of an employee and jobs aren't a luxury people need a job to live to buy food, shelter and clothing, etc.. This mentality that if workers don't like their employment arrangement too bad hit the road is outrageous and not what the vast majority of Americans think is right. Employers have a civic duty to as much as they can pay a worker a good wage and provide good working conditions and good terms of employment for their workers. Until the people across America, especially wealthy people and executives of big corporation, that hold this aforementioned anti-worker mentality get this that workers count and have rights whether or not listed on a piece of paper and such rights should be respected there is going to be a lot of turmoil and anger in America and the fallout from such affects will often be a real hardship on them!
Mr. Factor is so uneven handed in this article it makes his position laughable! He seeks to make a big deal that as of July 2011, the Department of Homeland Security had 62 employees working full-time on union activities; what a meaningless criticism the number of work locations of DHS must number at least in the hundreds, for alone there is at least a hundred plus airports across the country which have DHS worksites, sixty-two such employees for all the varied DHS work locations is not unreasonable at all. Mr. Factor offers further support for his thesis by mentioning that in 1998 there was 946 federal employees throughout the entire federal government workforce working full-time on union activity and therefore working under this "official time" classification, this is not a very persuasive point if one considers that there probably was around 150,000 to 200,000 unionized federal workers in the total workforce at that time which produces about a 1 full-time union official to every 150 or 200 union federal workers which a reasonable person shouldn't consider out of line. To consider the extreme ends people like Mr. Factor will go to advance their anti-union agenda one need only examine the latter portion of the article where he says "47" states have "gift clauses" in their constitutions that prohibit government subsidies to private entities his meaning being that this allowing federal workers who are also union officials to work full-time on union business and still get their federal worker pay is essentially a gift from the federal government to its unions and thus should be outlawed; this logic is clearly twisted and nonsensical when an employer enters into a collective bargaining agreement the employer has a duty to see the employees rights covered by the agreement are given to them this providing of "official time" to federal worker union officials is merely part of the federal government employer fulfilling this duty pursuant to the collective bargaining agreement!
The problem with Mr. Factor is a problem that a lot of Republicans and their allies have which is they don't recognize the natural rights of workers, the rights that a person of good virtue would consider that all workers are entitled to. A perfect example of this bad ideology is this Senate candidatie Mr. Akin's response when a person recently asked him publicly if he was anti-union, he didn't say I fully support collective bargaining rights but I think union agreements should be fair to employers as well as employees, no this anti-union candidate essentially said I believe in a system where employers should be free to set the terms of employment for their employees and if an employee doesn't like those terms he is free to seek employment elsewhere. This value or ideology is so off-the-charts bad that someone who holds it should not only not be in public office he or she shouldn't even ever be able to be a candidate for public office in America; the leverage that employers have over an individual employee is enormous and dwarfs that of an employee and jobs aren't a luxury people need a job to live to buy food, shelter and clothing, etc.. This mentality that if workers don't like their employment arrangement too bad hit the road is outrageous and not what the vast majority of Americans think is right. Employers have a civic duty to as much as they can pay a worker a good wage and provide good working conditions and good terms of employment for their workers. Until the people across America, especially wealthy people and executives of big corporation, that hold this aforementioned anti-worker mentality get this that workers count and have rights whether or not listed on a piece of paper and such rights should be respected there is going to be a lot of turmoil and anger in America and the fallout from such affects will often be a real hardship on them!
