The law creating TSA in the wake of the 9-11 attacks granted agency management stronger powers over its workforce. Image: DHS photo by Sydney Phoenix
By: FEDweek StaffDHS has withdrawn collective bargaining rights from TSA’s 47,000 transportation security officers—screeners—reversing more than a decade of allowing them and likely setting up yet another legal challenge over Trump administration’s federal workplace policies.
In its statement, the TSA asserted that union contracts protect poor performers and those who abuse leave policies, and also targeted the use of “official time”—which is allowed by law in negotiable amounts for employees to perform certain union-related duties. “TSA has more people doing full-time union work than we have performing screening functions at 86% of our airports. Of the 432 federalized airports, 374 airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to preform screening function,” it said.
The screeners’ union, the AFGE, responded that “They gave as a justification a completely fabricated claim about union officials – making clear this action has nothing to do with efficiency, safety, or homeland security. This is merely a pretext for attacking the rights of regular working Americans across the country because they happen to belong to a union.”
It said that the 200 employees who are on official time full-time “account for less than half a percent of all work hours performed at TSA. There are fewer union representatives nationwide at TSA than the number of total screeners at 86% of individual federal airports.”
Said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, “DHS claiming that TSA has more people doing ‘full-time union work’ than ‘performing screening functions’ at most airports is clearly nonsense. Similarly, promotions are already merit based and often only occur with the assistance of the union, not despite it.”
Thompson said he hopes the action is challenged and the AFGE said that was its intent—most likely through a complaint before the FLRA—saying, “Let’s be clear: this is the beginning, not the end, of the fight for Americans’ fundamental rights to join a union.”
While the action is in line with general Trump administration policies to restrict the role of unions in the federal workplace, the TSA in ways a special case. The law creating it in the wake of the 9-11 attacks granted agency management stronger powers over its workforce compared with general civil service law applying to other agencies, including the right to exclude collective bargaining.
From then until 2011, screeners could be union members and unions could provide certain services to them—such as representing them in grievances—but could not bargain for them. The then-Obama administration in that year granted bargaining rights, although still not as full as those in other agencies.
That resulted in an election between the AFGE and the NTEU union—both had formed units in the agency even in the absence of bargaining—which the AFGE won. During the remainder of that administration and in the Biden administration, the scope of bargaining was expanded several times. The AFGE and the agency had reached a new seven-year contract last year.
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