Trump Tries to Blow Up Airport Screeners Union

In a memo that that one TSA employee said sounded like “a teenage blogger writing about someone they don’t like,” the Department of Homeland Security announced March 7 that it was cancelling the union contract for 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration.

The American Federation of Government Employees signed its contract with TSA in May 2024, and it wasn’t set to expire until 2031.

DHS also stopped deducting union dues, and ordered all union officers to immediately return to their TSO duties. Workers voted in the union in 2011.

“To have this thing that you fought for… wiped away at the speed of an email, without any notice, was devastating,” said Joe Shuker, who hired in 20 years ago and worked to build the union. “But look,” he said, “we’ve been here before.”

THE ROT RETURNS

Suddenly without a union, “the creep and the rot is coming back quickly,” said Lowell Denny, a TSO in Austin, Texas. By Saturday morning, management was already telling TSOs not to call in sick, he said.

“They’re back to the old tone: ‘We’re watching you,’” said Denny, who has worked for TSA for 20 years at five different airports. He recalled how, before workers had a contract with seniority rules, agency managers would “give their favorites prime schedules.”

“In San Diego, the Assistant Federal Security Director was laughing to the employees and kind of taunting them, like, ‘Hey, you don’t have a union anymore,’” said Bobby Orozco, president of the Southern California local. “As of Friday, there’s absolutely no grievance procedure.”

Management instantly ended a widely used system for trading shifts that is laid out in the contract, and enables TSOs to make time for important life events. “I’m puzzled why TSA has suspended that, I don’t see the harm,” said Denny.

“I was on the bargaining team that got shift trading,” said Shuker, who was president of the Philadelphia local for 15 years. “It was big to be able to give somebody your shift.” He said it helped people avoid taking sick leave—and the reduction in absences benefited managers, too.

At many airports, previously scheduled bidding for shifts for the busy summer season has been cancelled. Workers guessed this meant the seniority system dictated by the contract was being dismantled.

CAREFULLY PLANNED ATTACK

Ordinarily the union, AFGE TSA Council 100, would appeal the decision to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that certified the union in 2011. But the Trump administration illegally fired the authority’s chair on February 11, and the two remaining members cannot conduct business because they lack a quorum.

“Everything that is being done today was all planned and premeditated,” said Gilbert Galam, secretary of AFGE Local 1230 and a TSO in Sacramento, California. “The opposition very much did their homework when they decided they were going to union-bust.”

Right after taking office, Trump fired TSA’s director, David Pekoske, whom he had appointed in 2017. Pekoske was in the middle of his second five-year term leading TSA.

BOGUS REASONING

The administration memo claimed the union had to be eliminated because it was hamstringing personnel decisions. And it ridiculously claimed that “TSA has more people doing full-time union work than we have performing screening functions at 86 percent of our airports” (italics in original).

In reality, the union had 168 full time and 25 part-time union representatives on ‘official time,’ serving 46,600 bargaining unit members, said Orozco. In Philadelphia, there were four union reps out of 800 TSOs, said Shuker.

If sick leave abuse happened, Denny said, “then management did have a right to impose leave restriction and progressive discipline. But all that’s gone.”

If anything, workers said, dumb new demands have been an obstacle to getting work done.

“You know, so you’re looking for bombs. And now you’re worried about, ‘Oh, let me get the five things to [Elon] Musk that I did,’” said Shuker. “They had to drag people off the floor to do that.”

But it’s even more disruptive and distracting to abrogate the contract, Denny said: “There are no more rules about anything.”

Workers said managers regularly pull TSOs off the floor to do clerical tasks and to assist managers with email, amounting to many more worker-hours than are spent on union tasks.

PAY RAISE, FINALLY

It was the union that brought stability to the workforce, Shuker said, through better work rules and by pushing Congress to include TSOs on the same pay schedule as other federal workers. Before a recent pay raise, TSA turnover was 20 to 25 percent a year, the highest in the federal government.

Just in Philadelphia, they lost 200 officers a year, Shuker said: “People were leaving TSA to go work at the Chick-fil-A in the airport, because the pay was better and the hours were better.”

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The result was a lot of mandatory overtime for those who remained. Attrition was expensive, too. Training a new officer costs $40,000, Shuker estimated.

The 2023 pay increase amounted to 30 percent for some workers. Now TSO starting pay in Philadelphia, with a locality differential, is $48,348 a year. In a cheaper area like Rapid City, South Dakota, it’s $45,659.

But pay was not the only thing that reduced turnover. “People not only felt like they were getting paid, but also that they were… accumulating rights” since unionizing in 2011, Orozco said. “There was a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“The fact that they’re telling folks that they took the union away, that’s a constitutional right that they’re taking away from people,” he said. “This is more than just our agency and our workers. These are constitutional violations that are happening.”

ENDGAME IS PRIVATIZATION

Workers have been sharing screenshots of the pages from Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership detailing a plan to privatize the service. “We know what their intent is, because the blueprint was already written in Project 2025 and is there for all to see,” said Orozco. “And now we’re seeing it being manifested.”

Airport security was all private before the September 11, 2001, attacks. Several workers told me they thought that patchwork for-profit system allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen.

“That’s why we needed a national system, that’s not looking to make a profit,” Orozco said. “Our message to the American people is that we’re not here to make a profit. We’re here to make sure that you’re safe, and you get home safe, and your family gets home safe.”

TSA was created under the DHS in 2001 to overhaul airline security. The workforce accounts for about a quarter of DHS workers.

Originally the workers had no union rights, and they were excluded from Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which covers other federal workers. But many wanted to organize. AFGE helped the workers develop a plan: even with no rights, they would act like a union. Workers paid dues and helped co-workers defend themselves from unfair discipline and discrimination, using the small leeway provided by management directives.

They objected to ridiculous work rules, like one dictating that you couldn’t take sick leave adjacent to a day off. But some workers faced discipline because their regular schedule was two 10-hour days followed by a day off. Any sick day they might try to take was by definition next to a day off.

They even had to fight for free parking, at a time when starting pay was around $12 an hour and urban airport parking could run $30 a day.

By the time they won the right to a union election, AFGE had chapters at 38 airports. The workers won their election and the Federal Labor Relations Authority certified the union in 2011. But it wasn’t until 2021 that the Biden administration included TSOs under Title 5, leading to a big pay bump that reduced attrition.

DON’T PANIC

Orozco’s advice to fellow TSOs? “Don’t panic,” he said, recalling their decade-long effort to unionize. “We’ll do it again like we did last time, and sooner.”

He said the union is working with other airport and aviation unions—flight attendants, pilots, and airport workers in SEIU and AFSCME—to form a united front.

“I’m kind of excited to meet the challenge,” said Galam. “But it feels like the odds are stacked against us at the same time.”

He and other TSOs said they’ve been quickly signing up members for electronic dues, and even though the union is no longer recognized, people are eager to sign up. “We’ve been having a lot of people asking how they can be involved,” he said.

SICK OF IT

During the previous Trump administration, TSOs were required to work without pay for more than a month during a government shutdown in January 2019, the result of a fight in Congress over funding a border wall.

After weeks of no paycheck, TSO sick calls soared. Some workers didn’t have gas or childcare money, while others may have been objecting to being forced to work for free. Airport terminals in Miami and Houston had to shut down. Flights started to back up.

The shutdown ended when the “blue flu” spread to air traffic controllers, further snarling airports. Sara Nelson, president of the Flight Attendants (AFA), called for a general strike, arguing that flight attendants and passengers were being made unsafe by the stress inflicted on TSOs and air traffic controllers.

On Friday, Nelson said the administration’s current move is “terrible for aviation security and everyone who depends on safe travel... [and] an egregious attack on workers’ rights that puts us all at risk.”