Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—The only way to deal with the massive morale crisis among employees at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), made clear in a recent survey of TSA workers, is to grant them collective bargaining rights, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley said. The union represents TSA employees at three major airports.

In a letter to TSA Administrator Kip Hawley, President Kelley called for a prompt meeting to discuss this crisis impacting the nation’s security. “I assume you are as troubled as I am by the results” of the survey, she wrote. “I look forward to an opportunity to discuss these matters with you in more depth.”

Clearly, President Kelley said, the internal survey of its employees by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals the deep flaws in TSA’s current approach to managing its workforce. For example, she noted that fewer than half the respondents, 48.5 percent, responded positively to the question of whether “physical conditions allow employees to perform their jobs well.”

Kelley said NTEU members have told the union about such appalling workplace conditions as the lack of clean bathrooms, lack of available water for drinking, lack of adequate space for break rooms and the lack of parking at airports. “These quality of life factors contribute in a significant way to how an employee views his or her job,” she wrote.

“The only way we can have the kind of engaged, professional workforce” the nation’s security demands “is to allow Transportation Security Officers to have collective bargaining rights,” the NTEU leader wrote. With such rights, she added, “employees become partners in the mission in a way that empowers them” and they obtain “a stake in the success of transportation security.”

Kelley noted pointedly in her letter to Hawley that “it is within your power” to grant employees collective bargaining rights; the statute establishing TSA left that determination up to the agency head.

Other TSA employee survey responses underscore NTEU’s continuing opposition to the agency’s Performance and Accountability Standards System (PASS), a system used not only to determine whether an employee can retain her or his job, but which plays a key role in merit pay and promotion decisions and opportunities.

Only 20.9 percent of respondents said they believe promotions are based on merit; less than one-quarter, 24.5 percent, believe that differences in performance are recognized in a meaningful way; and just 23.6 percent believe pay raises depend on how well employees perform their jobs.

“Mr. Secretary,” President Kelley wrote, “these statistics are abysmal. This system is broken, and it appears there are no parts of PASS even worth keeping.” TSA recently has made some modest changes in PASS, which NTEU has said do not go nearly far enough.