House Democrats Push for TSA Screeners to Receive Title 5 Employment Protections

In a House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation and Marine Security hearing on May 4, Democrats urged their colleagues to support legislation that would extend Title 5 employment protections to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners.

“Since TSA’s establishment nearly 20 years ago, its workforce has lacked the workplace rights and protections afforded to other federal employees. Despite the dedication and the diversity of the transportation security officers, or the TSOs, they remain among the lowest-paid workers in the entire government,” said Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), who chairs the subcommittee.

Entry level TSA screening personnel are currently exempted from the basic civil service protections codified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code that apply to TSA management and most of the career executive branch workforce. Transitioning screeners to Title 5 would give them access to the General Schedule pay system, full federal sector collective bargaining rights, the ability to appeal adverse personnel actions to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and whistleblower protection rights.

American Federal of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelly testified that the current TSA system allows managers to act wantonly and to intimidate employees, who are not protected from reprisal for complaining about harassing and conduct.

Former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chief Human Capital Officer Jeff Neal advised caution. He testified that the proposed legislation would require TSA to transition too quickly, and he recommended that TSA should use its existing authority to redesign its own system.  “Moving 50,000 employees to a different personnel system is a highly complex process requiring extensive planning,” Neal testified. He continued, “The six-month transition laid out the bill doesn’t provide adequate time to conduct the planning, systems changes and training required, and rushing implementation almost certainly ensures that it will be done badly, putting employees and the mission at risk.”

Offering a counter-point to Neal, former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism Policy Tom Warrick testified that while TSA could redesign its own system, “the fact that it hasn’t been done for so many years would lead you to believe that it’s just not a workable solution.”

Entry level screener salaries currently average $35,000 per year. On the Best Places to Work Agency Rankings prepared by the Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group, TSA ranks 398 out of 420 federal agency subcomponents.