A new report by New Jersey's State Commission of Investigation exposes a common practice of "official" or "release" time and has rightly made headlines. See here, here, here, here, and here. The practice entails paying public employees to work for their union. Over a five year period, the report found, the Garden State paid more than $30 million for public workers to conduct union business.

Be sure to catch the opening statements in this week's PublicSectorInc.org online debate at 12pm today. Throughout this week, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Dan DiSalvo and University of Toledo professor Joseph Slater will be debating whether "dues check-off" and "agency shop" - two unique fund-raising mechanisms enjoyed by public sector unions - are in the public interest. Share your thoughts about their posts in real-time by using the "comment" feature found on the online debate page. Also, submit one question that you would like to see them debate by sending an email to psi@manhattan-institute.org. We will select one question from the audience, which will be debated on Wednesday, April 25, so start thinking of your submissions now. With the impending recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker coming-up on June 5, this issue is of critical importance to better understanding how public unions and the public interest intersect in American politics.

In my Wall Street Journal op-ed on Stockton last Saturday, I observed that the city's current officials have admitted that Stockton got into its problems by making promises to employees that nobody bothered to add up at the time they were made, and by cutting deals for compensation that often hid the true cost of employee pay.

Stockton admitted that its biggest problem has been a lack of transparency resulting in a host of "hidden costs" in labor agreements for "obligations that are often difficult for citizens to identify or understand."

While one can never get too confident in the reformist promises of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, it seems unlikely that the Democratic chief executive of America's second-largest city would pick a fight with public employees just for sport. And with the City of Angels facing a $220 million budget deficit, Villaraigosa is beginning to talk tough about a substantial increase in the retirement age for the city's new hires.

"Release" or "official" time is the innocuous sounding name for governments paying the salaries of public employee union officials. George Will's column yesterday hits the tip of an iceberg. He relies on a report from the Goldwater Institute, whose investigative work uncovered that the City of Phoenix is paying the $900,000 annually to the officers of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), the police union. These monies pay them to work exclusively on union business, including lobbying. In addition, the officials of the six other public employees unions in the city also have full-time city jobs. The total annual bill annual for release time is $3.7 million. And this is in a weak union state. This is not the only way that cities and states can pay for union officials...