While Glenn may well be right that the TSA should be abolished in favor of a crowdsourced security policy (in Stealing You Blind, I discuss how the TSA has — incredibly — made us worse off than before 9/11), it isn’t going to happen any time soon. The TSA is joining the American Federation of Government Employees, on the basis of 8,000 employees out of 40,000 voting for the AFGE in the union election, and the AFGE knows what has to be done to improve the TSA:
Top priorities include adjusting policies around shift and leave scheduling and moving from the Performance Accountability and Standards System, the agency’s pay-for-performance plan, back to the General Schedule. PASS is “discriminatory and blatantly unfair,” particularly for senior employees, women and minorities, he said.
“The pay system and evaluation of employees to qualify for pay increases is horrible,” he said. “It’s a fraud, and we’re going to lay a lot of sunshine on that through the bargaining process. But bargaining is not the answer. We have to kill that system, and any type of management that cares about employees knows this has to go.”
So that’s why the TSA is incompetent — senior employees are discriminated against!
If the AFGE gets dues from all TSA employees, that’s approaching an extra $30 million in revenue for the union. You can bet that a goodly portion of that will be spent on lobbying for an expanded TSA.