Airport screening officers will get about a $13,000 annual boost beginning July, part of law signed by President Biden last week

Cash is always a good gift, and the officers who screen travelers at airports will soon get a big raise thanks to the $1.7 trillion spending bill that President Biden signed into law last week. Collective bargaining rights were made even better for workers on December 30.

If you don’t count people who just got hired, the average officer will get a raise of about $13,000 per year, or 28%, starting in July. With federal locality pay, the raise is even bigger. With location-based percentage raises, the officers’ pay would range from $37,695 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to $91,496 in San Francisco, which is very expensive. Only a small number of police officers will make that much.

According to the federal Office of Personnel Management, this is the biggest increase in federal pay in at least 30 years and probably ever.

This is good news for the 45,000 security officers and other TSA workers who screened more than 2 million airline passengers on Thursday. It is also good news for Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss. ), who pushed hard for the raise when he was chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, a position he held until this month.

“For more than 15 years, I have led efforts to fix the unfair treatment of TSA’s Transportation Security Officers, who keep our skies safe but are among the lowest-paid workers in the federal government and don’t have the same rights,” Thompson said, calling the raise “by far the biggest improvement for the workforce in TSA’s history.”

In December, TSA Administrator David P. Pekoske issued a “Determination” that gave workers more rights. The “Determination” rolled back strict rules on collective bargaining that Pekoske put in place when Donald Trump was president. Biden put Pekoske back in his job because he supports unions, which is a big part of what he does as president.

Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Government Employees TSA Council 100, said that under Trump, TSA collective bargaining issues “got rolled back to almost nothing.” “Now that we’re in the Biden administration,” he said, “almost all collective bargaining rights are set to open up.”

But this put Pekoske in the strange position of having to deal with two very different ways of dealing with workers. So, what exactly does he think?

Pekoske said that the “pure practicality” of funding support for collective bargaining from the Trump and Biden administrations made it necessary for him to enforce policies that were at odds with each other. He said this in a phone interview while he was at an airport checkpoint in Las Vegas. Biden is for unions, and he has put money behind that policy. Trump didn’t.

Pekoske said, “The Biden administration took a very different view on that, which I fully support.”

Better pay was “truly a necessity in terms of simple fairness and equality for our employees,” he said. It was also a “operational necessity.” He said, “With the pay levels we have now, it’s very hard to find and hire new employees and also to keep the good ones we already have.”

Pekoske said that the pay raise will cost the federal government about $1.4 billion a year. “That in and of itself shows what a big pay gap there was for many, many years,” he said.

It’s worth it because better pay and stronger bargaining rights will have a “direct impact on the public” at airport screening points through “improved workplace climate and the general morale of our front line employees,” he said. “I think people will realize that as time goes on.”

Now, morale at the TSA stinks.

The Partnership for Public Service and the Boston Consulting Group’s 2021 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government report, which is based on OPM surveys, ranked TSA 426 out of 432 similar federal agencies in terms of employee engagement and satisfaction. Pekoske wants the TSA to be one of the best government jobs.

Biden pushed for the TSA to have more bargaining rights. On April 26, 2021, he signed an executive order saying that “it is the policy of my Administration to encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining.” A few weeks later, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sent a memo to Pekoske outlining three areas “that will help the staff and make the organization stronger.”

In his memo, Mayorkas said that airport screeners should be “paid at a level that is no less than that of their counterparts.” He also said that TSA employees, like other federal workers, should be able to appeal decisions made by management about their jobs through the Merit Systems Protection Board, a federal agency that acts like a court. This was done through a deal between the TSA and the board in September.

These legislative and administrative changes finally make TSA working conditions more like those of other agencies. They also give employees more power to change the way their workplace works.

Jones said, “All of our sister and brother agencies in the Department of Homeland Security have full rights to collective bargaining.” “Agents of the Border Patrol have it. It is with the customs agents. We both do the same things.”

But the TSA officers probably talk to the public more than their colleagues do. Airport screeners are often the last thing standing between impatient passengers and their flights. This means they sometimes have to deal with angry travelers who are upset about safety procedures.

“We’re not looking for your water bottle, soap bottle, and deodorant,” said Hydrick Thomas, president of AFGE Council 100. “Do you think it’s fun for the workers to pat you down and run their hands over your private parts? I don’t like it, but we have to do what we have to do to keep everyone safe.”

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