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Washington, D.C.— The airline security bill signed into law today responds to the public’s demand for action. What the American public didn’t expect and does not want, said the leader of the nation’s largest independent federal employees union, is an airport security workforce that “exists outside the federal merit-based personnel system,”
“It is a law that places ‘federalized’ airport security workers outside the federal personnel system and leaves to the sole discretion of a single political appointee the conditions of employment. Many members of Congress–Republicans and Democrats–have said this law was a compromise reached quickly and that it is not perfect. Clearly, the most glaring flaw is the scrapping of the federal personnel system and risking the return to a time when politics drove conditions of employment,” said National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) National President Colleen M. Kelley.
The union leader said Congress has the responsibility to revisit the federal personnel provisions included in the new law, including the sole discretion given to the newly-established undersecretary of transportation to decide not just the pay of airport security workers, but whether they would have health and life insurance, retirement benefits, workers’ compensation, veterans’ preferences, equal employment opportunity rights, whistleblower protections, and other rights under Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which covers federal workers.
NTEU President Kelley repeated her earlier assertion that the 100 to zero vote in the Senate for full federalization of airport security personnel more accurately reflects not just the will of the American people but the needs of the nation for security in air travel.
“Unless Congress acts to extend coverage of the nation’s civil service laws to the 28,000 airport security employees,” she said, “we will be saying to the public that this critical element of our transportation network is safely in the hands of federal employees when that is not truly the case.”
“This is exactly what Title 5 was designed for,” the NTEU president said, “providing coverage for federal workers under the merit-based personnel rules of federal law.”
NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.