How You're Unwittingly Funding Public-Sector Unions to the Tune of Hundreds of Millions of Dollars
Plus: My take on the Trump indictment, mega-threads on Durham, IRS Whistleblowers, censorship regime
To Unions, Organizing Time Is Fine When It's on the Taxpayers' Dime
In RealClearInvestigations, I explore a little-scrutinized feature of union collective-bargaining agreements: “official time” or “release time” provisions -- clauses that allow employees, including federal, state, and local government workers, to engage in union-related activities full- or part-time during their working hours on your dime:
Across the federal government, official time has historically diverts more than $150 million in public funds toward union work annually.
Combining the cost of release time at the state and local levels, one estimate puts the total annual bill for public-sector union activities at as high as $1 billion.
Exhibit A is Randi Weingarten, 65, the teacher’s union leader who’s been on leave from Brooklyn’s Clara Barton High School for a quarter century. She stands to take an educators’ pension of $230,000 over her first 15 years of retirement -- on top of the more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits she earns as a labor executive.
Proponents of these arrangements say they provide bang for the taxpayers’ buck.
Critics contend these provisions create a costly and potentially unconstitutional publicly funded benefit for unions – without providing any labor “peace dividend.”
We have very little comprehensive and verifiable data — seemingly by design — about how much release time Americans are paying for at the state and local levels, what that time is actually used for, and what the purported benefits are for us as taxpayers.
But as I document in my investigation, what we do know indicates that we are talking about millions of your dollars within each state each year underwriting political activities, as well as recreational activities like barbecues — demonstrating there may be significant abuse in this practice.
Read the whole thing here.
My Take on Trump Indictment, CISA’s Censorship Leadership Exposed, IRS Whistleblowers on DOJ Obstruction of Biden Investigation, Durham Testimony
At Newsweek I wrote about the Trump indictment, noting that the coming fireworks in U.S. v. Donald Trump, among the most fraught legal cases in the history of the republic, ought not to distract us from the judgment already handed down by dint of the case being brought in the first place: the consignment of the United States to a place among the nations of the Third World.
You can find my companion commentary at Straight Arrow News below:
I’ve also taken to publishing a handful of mega-threads capturing in real-time my thoughts on a slew of critical developments pertaining to the weaponization of the federal government — some of which will serve as the basis of columns to come. Check them out below:
