Workers Mobilizing to Get Bargaining Rights for Transportation Security Officers

by James Parks, Dec 8, 2009

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler hears firsthand about TSO working conditions from Farzal Ahmed, a member of AFGE Local 1442, along with Frank Sylvester and Vanessa Moseley from AFGE.

More than 120 workers from nine unions braved cold weather in Phoenix yesterday to rally and show solidarity with Transportation Security Agency (TSA) workers who are seeking a union.

The Phoenix rally shows workers across the country are standing strongly behind the employees who protect the flying public. Over the next few weeks, the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions are mobilizing to draw attention to the plight of these workers and the unfair ways they are being treated.

Even though federal border guards, immigration and customs and Federal Protective Service employees are already union members, TSA employees still do not have collective bargaining rights.

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler stopped by National Airport near Washington, D.C., yesterday to talk with TSA workers about their concerns. Workers there and at airports across the country are concerned about pay levels, high staff attrition, low morale and severe rates of workplace injuries.

At the Phoenix rally, Rebekah Friend, executive director of the Arizona AFL-CIO, pledged the support of the Grand Canyon State’s union movement for the TSA workers.  

Although TSA workers have been denied the freedom to bargain collectively, 12,000 of them are members of AFGE, which regularly represents them before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Congress and in the courts.

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

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 their rights that the Bush administration stripped away in 2003. In addition, the bill grants transportation security officers and other TSA workers “whistle-blower” rights and the same civil service protections enjoyed by other federal workers.

In 2003, President George W. Bush took bargaining rights away from transportation security officers 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 transportation security officers in 2007, but that provision was dropped in conference after Bush threatened to veto the bill.

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