Nearly 2,000 Transportation Security Administration employees in New England are scrambling to find out what their job projections are after the Department of Homeland Security ended a collective bargaining agreement with TSA screeners on March 7.
Dave Boucher, treasurer and secretary for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2617, works at the Manchester Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire. He said that while employees affected by the termination have been dealing with it well, the process has been filled with uncertainty.
“Without the [collective bargaining agreement], everybody’s like ‘What’s the rule now?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, you’ve got to wait until TSA comes out with guidance,’” Boucher said.
The TSA did release its guidance on Tuesday night. But he and others haven’t had the time to sift through what changes it has compared to the original 190-page agreement.
Mike Gayzagian is president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2617 which represents those TSA employees in New England. He said the situation is unprecedented.
“It’s unfair to us. It’s unfair to the members whose representation they just took away and their right to join a union,” Gayzagian said. “It’s a really nasty thing to do.”
The nixing of the agreement has affected 45,000 TSA employees nationally.
The AFGE Local 2617 represents 2,000 employees across 14 airports in New England. The union helped with “human resources” related things, Gayzagian said. Areas such as personnel and pay were out of the scope of the union.
“All these things that the administration was complaining about that we allegedly got involved in and now we’ll be more efficient — we never got involved in anyways,” he said. “It was all essentially work place conditions, vacation time, how leave is administered.”
After TSA Administrator David Pekoske was fired once President Donald Trump took office, Gayzagian said he assumed something like this would happen.
“But we didn’t believe that they would out of the blue do this,” he said. “We figured there would at least be some kind of negotiation, some kind of warning. But nope.”
The Department of Homeland Security said officers will now have opportunities based on their performance, not longevity or union membership. A statement from the DHS said, “The union has hindered merit-based performance recognition and advancement — that’s not the American way.”
Many federal workers in New England have worried about how far the Trump administration would go with its federal downsizing. But as cuts have come to fruition, Gayzagian says that they have had adverse effects on the TSA and that they “certainly aren’t wasting taxpayer money.”
The collective bargaining agreement was signed by Pekoske last May and would’ve lasted until 2031. Gayzagian said many TSA employees were satisfied with the deal in place.
“We were the check and balance of unbridled power of management. And it was actually working very well. But the administration changed at the top and they have different ideas and they don’t like the unions,” Gayzagian said.
Adam Stahl has been interim administrator of the TSA since February. Some have debated that he might not have the authority to make such a decision as acting administrator.
Gatzagian said that litigation to challenge the decision is expected to begin soon.
