Employee abuse of "official time" has had an adverse impact on the Social Security Administration's ability to conduct business, witnesses told the House Ways and Means Committee's Social Security Subcommittee Thursday.
On the second of three days of congressional hearings on labor-management relations at the Social Security Administration, two SSA district managers and an American Federation of Government Employees local vice president said abuse of rules allowing employees to conduct union business on the job is affecting staff morale and productivity.
On Wednesday, SSA inspector general James G. Huse Jr. appeared before the subcommittee, chaired by Jim Bunning, R-Ky., to explain his findings about official time use at the agency.
Huse said SSA reported that employees spent 481,945 hours in 1996 on union activities at a cost of $14.7 million in salaries and expenses. SSA's 52,000 bargaining unit employees are represented by 1,800 union representatives, 145 of whom work on union activities full time. However, Huse said he could not verify the data SSA reported because the agency does not keep adequate records.
John Reusing, an SSA claims authorizer and third vice president of AFGE Local 1923, said Thursday that union activists conduct non-government business on official time.
"Employees have observed union activists selling real estate, working at Camden Yards stadium and doing home maintenance while on official time," Reusing said. "On many occasions I have seen my colleagues using official time to go shopping, conduct personal business or pursue hobbies such as fishing, golf and record collecting."
Edwin Hardesty, an SSA district manager in Tulsa, Okla., said he feels helpless when dealing with official time abuse. Hardesty's SSA center recently implemented a new system to report official time called the Official Union Time Tracking System. To support the new system, Hardesty needed some union officials to provide information on the allocations of time assigned to each union official. The appropriate official refused to provide the information.
"For full-time union officials, I have no controls available to me to ensure that their time is being used appropriately, or that the number of hours authorized users use complies with the contract," he said.
"It is disheartening," said Hardesty, "for staff members to be faced with backlogs of pending items, overflowing waiting rooms and telephone calls that need to be answered while they see employees that cannot be required to assist in processing the workloads," he said.
Jim Schampers, a SSA district manager in Waco, Texas, said that as the federal workforce downsizes, most employees are working so hard that "many of them go home in tears at the end of the day."
"With this in mind, think of how our employees feel when they look across the aisle and see a full time union employee reading a newspaper or a novel or playing a video game," Schampers said.
Despite their differences with unions, the three witnesses contended they are not "anti-union" or "anti-official time."
Witnesses at the hearing also discussed the labor-management partnership agreement between SSA and AFGE. Reusing criticized the arrangement. "With partnership came the implementation of pass/fail ratings and awards panels," he said. "These changes have lowered morale and reduced productivity."
SSA computer specialist Jim Beckstrom, however, praised partnership efforts. "I believe that partnership has helped us avoid unnecessary conflicts and focus more on solutions and results," he said.
Bobby Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, charged that the subcommittee's hearings were politically motivated.
On Friday, Witold Skwierczynski, president of the AFGE National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals, will express disappointment in the "vicious anti-union rhetoric," and testify that union officials are working to improve operations at SSA.
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