Time for release: Can cities unshackle themselves from abusive union perk?
By D. Dowd Muska | September 20, 2024
The stewards for Los Angeles County’s health-science professionals are allowed as much as 1,200 hours each year in a controversial benefit known as “release time,” whereby union officials are released to spend their taxpayer-funded time doing union business rather than working for the public. It’s a common union perk in municipalities across the country.
The Las Vegas teachers’ union can tap it for up to $100,000 in value, annually. Portland’s firefighters are given “800 hours per year.” Albuquerque’s school district grants its Communications Workers of America local “up to two hundred seventy-five (275) hours … per year.” Release time frees the president of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego County from “regularly scheduled duties” for as many as 2,210 hours “per fiscal year.”
Labor expert Trey Kovacs characterizes release time as a giveaway empowering “government employees to conduct union business on the taxpayer’s dime.” The practice pays the wages of officials who “negotiate contracts, participate in grievance procedures, attend union conventions and engage in other activities totally unrelated to any public purpose or civic duty.”
An analysis by the Florida-based James Madison Institute argued that release time “exclusively serves the interests of government employee unions.” Fiscal watchdogs have long agreed. In 2015, a Pennsylvania state legislator denounced the “ghost teachers” of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh education unions’ political operations, who “receive taxpayer-funded salary and benefits, accrue seniority and amass credit toward their pensions – just as if they were in the classroom.”
There have been legal efforts to challenge this unconscionable perk. In 2017, a Syracuse, N.Y., resident, claiming that the activities of the local school bureaucracy’s union “are often directly opposed to the interests of district taxpayers,” went to court to stop the “waste of taxpayer money.” No dice.
While release time exists at the federal and state levels, it’s most abundant in county and city governments. Unions press for the freebie to be written into collective-bargaining agreements. Given the cozy relationships often in place between management and personnel in local government, labor bosses are rarely denied subsidies to conduct their “business.”
But language in state constitutions has been lying in wait since the 19th century is starting to cause big trouble for release time. In late June, Texas’ Supreme Court determined the gratuity’s status. A month later, Arizona’s justices did the same.
Nearly every state has a gift clause or “anti-aid provision.” Most were enacted in the bitter aftermaths of canal and railroad boondoggles. According to the Mercatus Center, the measures took three forms: The “most common … forbade the government from loaning its credit to a private individual, association or corporation.” Other limitations prohibited “the government from becoming a stockholder in any corporation” and banned “loans or donations to any individual, association, or corporation.”
America’s second-largest state has a gift clause, and in 2016, two Austin residents, working with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Goldwater Institute, sued to block “one of the most corrupt and unlawful ways that the government provides favors to political benefactors and preferred special interests.” Their fight lasted eight years.
In late June, a majority of Texas Supreme Court justices ruled that release time for the Austin Firefighter’ Association, Local 975, was constitutional. The reason: the arrangement satisfied a three-pronged test for any “challenged expenditure.” Release time supplied a “public benefit,” it achieved a “public purpose” and its use was under “public control.”
Union enthusiasts couched the decision as a win – but was it? Goldwater’s Jon Riches noted that a “divided” court “held that lobbying, supporting candidates and other private activities were actually not allowed under the Austin contract in the first place.” Justices “focused only on interpreting the contract in principle, and held that it did not authorize … political activities.” As such, if “union officials … engage in lobbying, political and other private activities … in the future, it’s illegal.”
Four weeks after the Texas decision, Arizona made its call on release time. This time, taxpayers won – decisively.
In 2019, two city of Phoenix employees enlisted the Goldwater Institute’s attorneys to contest taxpayers’ obligation to furnish the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 2384, Field Unit II “with multiple release time benefits, including four full-time release positions, guaranteed compensatory time for high-ranking union officials using release time, a bank of release time hours per year to be used by other union representatives, and additional hours and direct payments for union members to attend union seminars, lectures, conventions and workshops.”
As in Austin, the case wound its way to the state’s highest court. Expressing the opinion of all seven members, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick wrote that “the costs and benefits … are so one-sided that it is difficult to envision how such expansive release time provisions could ever survive the consideration prong unless the employees genuinely paid for them through foregone wages.” By directing “significant public funds and resources to the union,” release time for the local was “an impermissible subsidy to a private entity.”
It was “the first time,” Goldwater beamed, “that a state high court … squarely struck down release time as unconstitutional.” The “watershed decision” wasn’t limited to Arizona – it “will have nationwide ramifications, too.” Riches told the Free Cities Center that the case “generated a good deal of interest within the legal and public policy communities.”
Gift clauses offer a powerful tool to activists and attorneys seeking to combat government-union predation. First a partial success in Austin, then a total victory in Phoenix. Perhaps your city is next.
Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.
