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Washington, D.C.—A report by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on its discredited pay-for-performance system revealed that nearly one-quarter of the workforce leaves the agency each year, an alarming statistic that calls for further congressional investigation into TSA pay and personnel practices, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees said today.

A major contributing factor to double-digit attrition at TSA, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, is the Performance Accountability and Standards System (PASS), a pay and promotion system which is widely viewed by employees as not fair, credible or transparent. Kelley criticized the perfunctory report TSA provided to Congress, saying it provided the bare minimum amount of information and failed to address the linkage between PASS and attrition.

“I am deeply concerned by these high attrition rates at TSA, coupled with the low morale documented in the recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee survey results,” said Kelley. “Our members tell us that attrition rates are even higher among the ‘D-Band’ Transportation Security Officers (TSOs), those the public interacts with every day at the airport and relies on to keep our skies safe.”

According to reports from TSOs represented by NTEU, the PASS system has resulted in arbitrary ratings with criteria that change continually, sometimes several times a year. Pay increases are lower than those other federal employees receive on the General Schedule. Application of the PASS system leads to random removal of employees or placement in non-screening status, further demoralizing the workforce.

NTEU’s work in pointing out the flaws in PASS also interested Congress, which last year, at NTEU’s urging, demanded that TSA provide a full report on the system to lawmakers. The result, said Kelley, was “clearly inadequate to give Congress a true picture of the serious personnel crisis at TSA that leads thousands of TSOs to depart the agency each year.”

According to the report, turnover at TSA in 2007 was 21.2 percent, up 0.3 percent from 2006, but down from 2005’s rate of 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. “It is alarming that such a critical workforce is in a constant state of flux.”

TSA announced that it was revising PASS, effective April 1 of this year. “Even after these changes,” Kelley said, “PASS still allows far too much management discretion in making merit pay determinations.”

For example, this year TSA gave raises to a greater number of employees without increasing the amount of money available for pay increases. The result is less money for those employees receiving raises.

“The PASS system is incredibly complex, with no apparent rhyme or reason to pay levels,” said Kelley. “We hear reports of experienced employees doing a good job who remain stuck for years in a pay band, only to see new hires come in off the street at the same rate of pay. It makes no sense.”

The ultimate solution to severe problems facing TSA employees, Kelley emphasized, is to extend to them collective bargaining rights and to place them on the General Schedule, the pay system covering the bulk of federal employees.

“A stable TSA workforce is in the best interest of our country” she said. “There simply is no substitute for collective bargaining, which would provide employees with a truly meaningful voice in their work lives.”

As part of NTEU’s successful organizing program for TSA employees, the union is working to shine a light on the myriad problems facing the TSA workforce, she said. “Absent collective bargaining, NTEU is doing all that we can to drive improvements in the lives of these deserving public servants.”