Taxpayers foot bill for union work, lawmakers seek changes | Fox News
i'm curious, how many here are dues paying union members? covered by a collective bargaining unit but don't pay dues? in a series not represented by a union?
I had to go back to the first post to see what this was supposed to be about.
Lots of interesting replies including one that said the poster thought Feds could not belong to a union. No time to search back for that but someone should look in to it.
I deal with two unions primarily. There are others covering contractors but that is nothing pertinent to this thread.
One union deals with general schedule employees and seems to be mostly concerned with square footage of work spaces.
The union I am covered by with a collective bargaining agreement which is discussed every year came to be “my” union due to some ancient thing about equivalency pay for craft trades.
The deal is that the union appointed by some federal law finds out how much equivalent trades in for profit industry are being paid as well as what benefits they are getting and tracks pay increases they get.
The history as I understand it is that the feds couldn’t hire or keep trades people at the old WG-05 rates and employees were leaving to get better jobs and no one was applying for the jobs advertised. Some GS-99 figured out that the reason was because they were paying nothing for these technical jobs.
When I accepted the job I automatically became a union member and was not required to pay dues. I chose to pay the dues.
Currently, in my agency, union reps are allowed to discuss union business while in pay status but do not get travel pay or per-diem if attending union functions off job site. They may actually be entitled to them but choose not to due to ongoing conflicts and BS. My rep used annual leave to attend the last out of town union meeting.
It may not be the same where you are but here pay and benefits for my series depend on negotiations of the bargaining agreement contract each year. The article lead me to believe it applies to employees who are GS or SES. I looked around and couldn’t find any person using 100% of their time for union business.
It appears once again that waste has been identified and all are being painted with the broad brush.
PO
, have we given them to MUCH power for to long. There was a time when Unions had a lot of power, and to a smaller degree still do, but squandered that power when greed and corruption of a few gave them a bad rap. I do not dislike Unions. Peoples ideologies are not all the same. How do I justify paying dues to an organization who in turn will donate money to a candidate that I do not identify with. Or do I just trust that they have my best interest at heart, highly doubtful. Obviously this is why there is a big push on one side to unionize everything (more campaign $) and more push against it on the other side (less campaign $). Some will argue that it gives you a voice, I will argue it gives someone a bunch of numbers behind one voice and I have no say in who they are aligning themselves with.
