In almost every state, government workers are doing labor unions’ political bidding on the taxpayer’s dime. This must end.
In almost every state, government workers are doing labor unions’ political bidding on the taxpayer’s dime. This must end.
D emocrats may have lost the 2024 election, but they’re already preparing for the 2026 midterms — and they have a secret weapon. In almost every state, government workers are doing labor unions’ political bidding on the taxpayer’s dime, including supporting liberal causes and candidates. For the sake of small-d democratic fairness, states should end these taxpayer subsidies for union partisanship, before these special interests abuse the public’s trust for their preferred party’s political gain.
This taxpayer-funded injustice is the result of a carve-out — often called “union time” — that government unions have secured in bargaining agreements with state and local authorities. Basically, unionized government workers can spend part of their workday doing union activities. That’s bad enough, since it diverts these workers away from their jobs. But what’s worse is that taxpayers fund this daytime moonlighting as if it is their job. It’s not. Public-school teachers are supposed to teach. Health officials are supposed to protect public health. Dog catchers are supposed to catch dogs. Taxpayers hired these people to work for the public good, not private and self-interested organizations like government unions.
Most states and cities don’t track how much time and money this carve-out costs, but as I show in a new report, those that do paint a worrisome picture. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, ten collective bargaining agreements have a combined 42,000 hours of union time, while in Tampa, five contracts allow for 10,000 hours. In Indiana, I found a school district that gives union members 45 days for union activity, while also paying half of the union president’s salary and benefits. Similar carve-outs can be found in state after state, and all told, more than 2 million government workers may have access to union time at a cost of hundreds of millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars a year.
What, exactly, are government workers doing on the taxpayer’s dime? In Des Moines, Iowa, some city workers have unlimited paid leave to lobby their own government. In other states and cities, government workers can either engage in political activity or do other union work. Yet even if they do seemingly nonpolitical activities, such as grievance investigations, that frees up money for the union to spend on politics. Either way, taxpayers are subsidizing political activity.
This matters because government unions are, more than anything else, political creatures. In the 2020–21 school year, the National Education Association — America’s largest teachers’ union, with affiliates in every state — spent half of its $374 million budget on direct political activities and politically adjacent projects. Across all government unions, nearly 90 percent of their political donations went to Democrats. In addition to directly supporting liberal candidates, they push liberal policies, such as ending school choice, raising taxes, and promoting unaffordable entitlements like “Medicare for All.” Government unions are already planning to double down on politics heading into the 2026 midterms, to say nothing of the 2028 presidential race.
Why should taxpayers be forced to subsidize politicians and policies they may not support? It’s a gross abuse of the public’s trust, and it directly threatens public finances. When government unions and their members engage in politics, they often push for more government spending, regardless of whether it’s affordable. As a result, through union time, taxpayers are unwittingly funding partisan activists who want to pick the taxpayers’ own pockets.
To be clear, union time would still be unjust if unions mostly supported Republicans or conservative reforms. The government should never use taxpayer money to fund any politician or policy issue. That’s why states should immediately take steps to roll back union time, if not end it outright. They should follow the lead of Arizona, where the legislature and governor banned taxpayer-funded union time in 2022, saving millions of dollars a year for state residents. The Arizona supreme court upheld the law earlier this year, noting that taxpayer funding for union business is “one-sided,” with “negligible” benefit to the government and citizens who cover the cost.
More states should follow Arizona’s lead, especially the battleground states that will be critical to the elections in 2026 and 2028. Government labor unions will do everything in their power to influence key races, and union time gives them an unjust taxpayer-funded advantage. Democrats are counting on them to bounce back from the 2024 elections, but small-d democratic fairness is far more important.