Screeners Fighting, Voting for a Voice on the Job

by James Parks, Jun 6, 2006

The Bush administration has denied employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) their freedom to bargain collectively by claiming, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that unions would be a security risk. But with assistance from AFGE, three years ago the employees launched a very ambitious campaign to organize baggage screeners. So far 1,000 screeners have signed cards attesting to their desire to become members of the union. AFGE National Organizer Peter Winch writes about why the TSA campaign is such an important effort:

When workers across the country are being denied their freedom to form unions or bargain collectively, TSA screeners, with the help of AFGE, are making their issues known to management.

The Bush administration has denied the screeners the freedom to bargain collectively. But the workers have refused to allow others to decide if they can have a union and are demanding to be able to bargain over wages and work conditions just as other federal employees.

TSA screeners are signing up every day to become members of Local 1. So far, some 1,000 screeners have joined the local. Although screeners remain deprived of a collective bargaining agreement, they have a union that actively represents them before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in courts, in Congress and in the media. Local 1 is a young organization, but screeners who join are showing their support for a positive, pro-employee agenda, and showing TSA that screeners deserve and demand respect.

AFGE started organizing screeners before the end of 2001. We collected significant support from private screeners before the federal government took over screening in 2002. We collected all necessary signatures to file for elections at several major airports in 2002 and 2003, only to have the Federal Labor Relations Authority rule that it lacked jurisdiction after then-TSA Director Adm. James Loy used his authority under the 2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act to opt out of collective bargaining. As part of our multifaceted campaign to overturn those decisions, we sued Loy and pushed for a congressional solution. Both efforts are still ongoing.

We also chartered Local 1 in March of 2003, to coincide with the transfer of TSA from the U.S. Department of Transportation to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Local 1 started with just 13 members who faced enormous pressures on the job because of their union membership. The workers overcame false accusations, management hostility, extra work assignments—all the same obstacles workers face when organizing on the job since unions began in this country. Local 1 members elected officers in the spring of 2004.

Local 1 is a successful example of what is sometimes referred to as “nonmajority unionism.” We provide a support network for union-minded employees in the TSA workforce. AFGE has not been deterred by the obstacles to collective bargaining that have been put in our way. We have simply worked around them to set up a structure of trained “primary representatives” at each airport with an active committee and a local that is prepared to take on workers’ comp, equal employment opportunity, whistle-blower and other statutory claims that remain available to TSA employees in some form.

As a result, a wave of transportation security officers are asserting their rights. Each week hundreds of TSA employees file workers’ comp claims as short staffing and pressure to move bags have led to numerous back injuries as well as stress complaints. Equal employment opportunity complaints apparently also number in the hundreds each week, with Congressional Quarterly reporting the level of complaints at TSA is astronomical for an agency of its size.

The answer to this flood of complaints and administrative actions on personnel matters is usually collective bargaining. Collective bargaining sets up a reliable grievance procedure that workers can have confidence in and that saves the employer court costs. Instead of allowing normal collective bargaining as at every other federal agency and large private employers, TSA is hiring additional legal staff to fight its own employees.

“Nonmajority” or not, we are using our status as the main organization representing the workforce to get stories in the media, some of which have resulted in the removal of imperious and venal federal security directors, and to develop key allies in the fight against re-privatization of the screening function.

AFGE President John Gage has forcefully demanded that TSA restore screeners’ rights to bargain collectively over working conditions. More than 3,000 supporters of workers’ rights listened at one rally as Gage laid out labor’s strategy for success. “Inch by inch, friends and families first, neighborhoods and communities next, we will build a momentum based on information and real American values that will stop…the erosion of the rights of working people.

Now, with the congressional elections just months away, transportation security officers (TSOs) and other federal employees are planning to use their voting strength to elect candidates that will give TSA employees and all federal employees a fair shake.

Really, Congress is like the board of directors for all federal agencies, and TSOs and other federal employees get to vote on who sits on that board. Let’s make change with that vote, and elect a pro-screener House and Senate. It is quite possible a different president or a new Congress will act to establish full federal employee rights for the TSA screeners, and AFGE is ready to move when that happens.

Our lobbyists working on TSA issues report that it is quite possible we will see the infamous anti-collective bargaining section of the Aviation Transportation Security Act struck from the law if we can elect a few more pro-screener legislators. This is the law that gives the head of the TSA the right to decide if he wants to allow collective bargaining or not. All of us need to rededicate ourselves this year to push Congress to allow full federal-sector union rights for TSOs and to get them to acknowledge TSA has misused the latitude they have been given and collective bargaining at TSA is in the public interest. 

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