Transparency Needed in the Process of Federal Collective Bargaining

Click here to download the report. 

by Molly E. Conway, founder and principal of Conway Capitol Consulting

I4AW’s report, titled “Transparency Needed in the Process of Federal Collective Bargaining,” reveals that likely hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are spent each year on costs associated with the process of collective bargaining between the federal government and labor unions.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests and other research, the report breaks down the cost into four categories:

• the bargaining process itself,
• government union perks,
• government union-focused bureaucracy, and
• “official time,” a practice in which unionized federal employees perform union-related activities while being paid by taxpayers. This is the first attempt to collect such data since 2019, which was the last time the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) reported on official time and costs associated with collective bargaining.

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