Millions of civil servants at every level—local, state and federal—worked selflessly and courageously to protect the public and sustain government operations in the aftermath of the vicious terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) represented more than 600,000 federal employees who were covered by a collective bargaining agreement on that tragic day, a time of intense uncertainty, with a need for swift federal action. Not one federal agency chose to override or ignore those agreements, including the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Border Patrol. No grievances resulting from workplace events on Sept. 11 were filed by any of the federal employees represented by AFGE.
In response to gaps in U.S. aviation security that were exploited by the Sept. 11 hijackers, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 (ATSA), which created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to provide oversight of aviation and other transportation security. The bill also answered the public’s demand for a professional, well-trained and well-compensated career screening workforce by federalizing the duties of airport checkpoint and luggage screening into the federal job of Transportation Security Officer (TSO). The Bush administration and its allies in Congress used the period of uncertainty following the Sept. 11 attacks to demand that ATSA include a provision to effectively deny collective bargaining rights and worker protections to TSOs under the guise of national security.
By virtue of one single statutory footnote, federal courts and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) have issued opinions interpreting that statutory footnote in a sweepingly broad manner by essentially allowing the TSA assistant secretary to pick and choose which labor rights and workplace protections the agency will deign to follow. Instead of utilizing procedures and adhering to laws applying to other federal workers—including other workers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—TSA has created processes that are a weak version of established practices in other government agencies. Among the most basic labor rights and workplace protections denied TSOs are:
- Collective bargaining,
- Protection against retaliation for union activities,
- Whistleblower protections,
- The Rehabilitation Act,
- Veterans’ preference,
- Leave and overtime protections, and
- Contractual right to the position or wages offered upon hiring.
In 2006, the International Labor Organization ruled that the law denying collective bargaining rights to 43,000 TSOs was a violation of a fundamental workers' right recognized by the international community. As a result of the denial of collective bargaining and labor rights and the inability to enforce the workplace protections afforded other DHS workers, TSOs have an attrition rate almost 10 times that of workers at other federal agencies and a workplace injury rate of 10 percent, among the highest of federal workers. According to a recent Office of Personnel Management report, workers at TSA have among the lowest morale of all federal agencies, and the DHS Office of Inspector General recently reported that TSOs’ lack of faith in the agency’s in-house grievance and ombudsman procedures, along with management retaliation against those who use those procedures, has impacted their usefulness.
In 2007, majorities in both the House and Senate voted to grant TSOs collective bargaining rights and worker protections in the 9/11 Commission bill, the first legislation passed by the new Democratic majority in the 110th Congress. Those provisions eventually were stripped from the final version of the bill due to a veto threat from the Bush administration. Even if the justification for the denial of rights to TSOs was based on the federal government’s emergent need to hire, train and deploy 43,000 TSOs over a short period of time, TSA has embarked on an operation of labor and workplace violations that are extensive, prevalent and ongoing. Now, seven years after the agency’s creation, the questionable justification of emergent circumstances to suspend TSO rights no longer applies.
The continuation of this systematic denial of fundamental labor and workplace rights undermines the collective bargaining rights and workplace protections of all federal workers.
The AFL-CIO calls on Congress to immediately pass H.R. 3212, a bill introduced by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) that grants TSOs the rights of other workers in DHS, and pledges to aggressively oppose other political attempts to use national security fears to curtail the collective bargaining rights of other federal workers.