Bargaining Rights for Airport Screeners Would Help Security

by James Parks, Dec 4, 2009

Granting collective bargaining rights to airport screeners and other Transportation Security Agency (TSA) employees would enhance national security, union leaders and Obama administration officials said this week.

Federal border guards, immigration and customs and Federal Protective Service employees are already union members. In an interview with CNN last night, AFGE President John Gage pointed out that union members routinely protect the national security:

 No one talked about union when the cops and fire fighters went up the stairs on 9/11 at the World Trade Towers. No one talks about our two members who took down the shooter at Fort Hood. There was nothing in their union membership that stopped them from doing their duties.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is using his opposition to collective bargaining rights for TSA employees to hold up confirmation of the Obama administration’s nomination of Erroll Southers to head the agency. During the 2008 campaign, President Obama pledged to make bargaining rights for TSA workers a priority. Gage and other union leaders say DeMint is endangering the traveling public by preventing the White House from filling such an important post.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed Gage’s comments when she told DeMint during a Senate hearing this week:

             Collective bargaining and security are not mutually exclusive.

TSA employees moved a step closer to bargaining rights in September when the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved legislation (H.R. 1881) restoring the workers’ rights that the Bush administration stripped away in 2003. In addition, the bill grants the screeners and other TSA workers “whistle-blower” rights and the same civil service protections enjoyed by other federal workers.

Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) says the restoration of collective bargaining rights is “long overdue” and will help the agency deal with the high attrition, low morale and severe workplace injury rates that have plagued the agency since its creation in 2001.

In 2003, President George W. Bush took bargaining rights away from screeners and other workers at the TSA in one of the first shots in his war on America’s workers. Both the House and the Senate approved bargaining rights for screeners in 2007, but that provision was dropped in conference after Bush threatened to veto the bill.

Although they have been denied the freedom to bargain collectively, AFGE represents 12,000 TSA workers nationwide and regularly represents these employees before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Congress and in the courts.

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