The new union contract is designed with politics in mind.
It will be increasingly difficult to fire the TSA agents who fail miserably.
F ew government agencies elicit more outrage than the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). From surly agents to invasive pat downs, the TSA is not known for customer service or efficiency. A new collective-bargaining agreement between the TSA and its federal-employee union will make them even less helpful.
When the TSA was established after 9/11, Congress gave it some flexibility to recruit outside of the civil-service system and typical union mandates. An early TSA chief warned that “fighting terrorism demands a flexible workforce. . . that can mean changes in work assignments and other conditions of employment that are not compatible with the duty to bargain with labor unions.”
In 2011, Obama gave the TSA employees the right to unionize. In 2021, despite Democrats controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could not reach an agreement to expand those rights. So the Homeland Security Secretary at the time, Alejandro Mayorkas, since impeached, expanded them on his own.
The new contract is designed with politics in mind. It was negotiated near the end of the term of the self-described “most pro-union president in American history,” whose White House explicitly recommended a new TSA contract. The contract is designed to stay in place for seven years, meaning past even the next presidential term. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal-employee union, which represents the TSA agents, said that they wanted a contract in place when the current leadership is gone because they lack congressional guarantees: “It’s not him we’re worried about. But if there’s a future administration who comes along or a change in the Homeland Security secretary,” they might not get as good a deal. The AFGE official said, “Once it’s signed, it’s going to be hard to roll back.”
The new contract is more detailed than the previous contract: It more than doubles the number of separate “articles” the government has agreed to, which include everything from uniform allowances to sick days. It will also make it harder to discipline bad, difficult, or just ineffective agents. Since TSA agents have been caught scheming to initiate unnecessary groin pat downs for passengers they thought were attractive, and they have failed tests to stop banned material, it doesn’t seem like making it harder to fire bad agents will serve the public.
The least justifiable part of the new agreement is its expansion of TSA employees’ “official time.” That is the euphemism for time paid by taxpayers that goes directly to union activities. The government, for reasons that remain obscure, stopped reporting the total amount of official time after 2019, and even removed the old numbers from their website. But then there were 2.6 million hours of official time paid by taxpayers. The cost has been estimated at well over $150 million annually.
The AFGE noted in a recent booklet that official time can be used to defend employees from agency actions and “negotiate contracts,” meaning the government is paying the other side to both argue with it and bargain with it. The AFGE celebrates that the new contract wins “additional hours to help us represent and empower members. “
The deal creates the possibility of more future union deals by allowing separate negotiations at individual airports on issues such as parking. Be prepared for even more stalemates and giveaways, depending on how strong AFGE locals are.
In one of the strangest parts of the new contract, management loses control of almost half of their workforce’s hours. The agreement allows agents to “shift trade” up to 40 percent of their time, meaning they can demand this time off and have other employees substitute for them. TSA agents have already been allowed to stay technically full-time even when trading away hours. On an online bulletin board last year, when the shift trade maximum was just half of what it is under the new contract, one person who claims to be a TSA employee noted that a bunch of his coworkers were moved to full-time but “don’t want the hours,” so he was going to trade with them. The other employees would get the perks of full-time without the pesky chore of actually working the hours.
The new union contract was not done at a particularly difficult time for the TSA agents or their union. Last year, the TSA secured a congressional pay boost of over 25 percent for their best paid employees. The AFGE just celebrated that it has over 300,000 members, from each of whom it collects about $250 in dues a year.
As Milton Friedman once said,“When you stand before a civil servant, is there any real doubt who is the servant and who is the master?” TSA agents have long treated their charges roughly, with little to show for it in terms of protecting the public. Now they will have even more ability to do so and face fewer consequences if they fail.