Airport screeners push for collective bargaining rights

As you fly home for the holidays, consider the plight of the security guard ushering you through the metal detector.

Airport security is not an easy job. Despite their charge to keep the nation’s travelers safe, transportation security officers get little respect, said Ricky D. McCoy, a security officer at O’Hare airport for eight years and president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 777, which covers officers in Illinois and Wisconsin, including about 720 at Chicago’s airports. Now McCoy is over 6-foot, so passengers don’t give him much guff, but they regularly insult his fellow officers when they enforce security guidelines. For this they earn between $30,000 and $35,000 a year.

More than a third of government employees are unionized, compared to 8 percent of the private sector. They have the right to bargain as a group for better pay and working conditions. But the country’s 40,000 transportation security officers do not belong to that third, even though they’re employed by the Department of Homeland Security. When the Bush Administration created the Transportation Security Administration in 2001, employees were forbidden to engage in collective bargaining because it might threaten national security.

Union opponents floated that “phony fear” for purely political reasons, said Brian DeWyngaert, AFGE’s chief of staff. DeWyngaert is in Chicago for the week to talk up his union, which has been trying to organize security officers since 2001. Tuesday he was at Midway, talking with officers near baggage claim and ticketing as they came on and off shift, and Thursday he’ll do the same at O’Hare.

Even though they don’t have the right to bargain, about 12,000 workers have joined AFGE anyway, DeWyngaert said. AFGE is battling with a second union, the National Treasury Employees Union, to represent the officers.

Victory on collective bargaining could come by spring. As a candidate President Obama promised to appoint someone to head the agency who would abolish the barrier to bargaining, and two weeks ago Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said she too supported the change. But Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is blocking the nomination of Erroll Southers for the TSA’s top job because DeMint opposes collective bargaining for security officers.

Still, DeWyngaert is optimistic.

“It’s been a long, long struggle, but we’re almost there.”