In a slap at TSA’s pay for performance system, the National Treasury Employees Union is calling on Congress to look into TSA pay and personnel practices, something it argues is the main culprit behind the agency’s notoriously high turnover.
TSA made changes to its performance accountability and standards system – PASS – on April 1. For example, it said it would remove requirement to sign-in for fitness duty, discontinue standard operating procedures tests in 2008, improve image tests and reduce competency and proficiency requirements.
TSA administrator Kip Hawley had described PASS in an email to employees, as “far too complicated,” and said the system “distracted the workforce from its primary mission with its confusing procedures and burdensome administrative and testing requirements.”
But even after those changes, said NTEU president Colleen Kelley, “PASS still allows far too much management discretion in making merit pay determinations.”
She cited a TSA report saying that in 2007 turnover was 21.2 percent. In 2005 turnover was a bit higher, 23.7 percent.
“With roughly 8,000 of the approximately 40,000-member TSA workforce leaving each year, TSA is incurring astronomical and unnecessary costs of training and retraining, recruiting and hiring and loss of productivity due to this revolving door,” said Kelley.
NTEU, with its eye on representing the TSA workforce in negotiations with management, called for collective bargaining rights and placing the workforce under the general schedule.
It said the PASS system is not fair, credible or transparent, and cited reports from its members – screeners can join unions, but have no bargaining rights – that the system produces arbitrary ratings with criteria that change continually.
