(c/o WK) Flying circus
Transportation Security Administration screeners discuss the agency's many shortcomings http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2005/01/20/cover_story/cover.txt BY EMMILY BRISTOL When the Transportation Security Administration announced it was hiring for McCarran International Airport in the fall of 2002, Mike Linihan thought this was his chance to change his life. The native Las Vegan had put in nearly two decades as a bartender and felt it was time for a new career with more opportunities. "A lot of people took that job on the point of starting a new career, like I did," Linihan said. "I bartended for almost 20 years and I was at the point where I wanted to get out of that environment. I thought maybe I'd have a fresh start on life, and everybody who took that job thought the same thing." Linihan, 40, worked as a baggage screener for about a year and half beginning in November 2002, just a month after the TSA took over security at McCarran. (The TSA was created when President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law on Nov. 19, 2002. It is charged with overseeing security at all of the nation's transportation facilities, chiefly airports.) But the luster of a new opportunity wore off quickly for Linihan and others like him at McCarran. "Morale was really bad. And it's a shame too, because everyone that took that job had intentions of bettering themselves and their lives," said Linihan, who was fired over scheduling conflicts. Indeed, reports have come in from all parts of the country about the mismanagement and bureaucracy that is plaguing the 2-and-1/2-year-old agency, which is within the Department of Transportation and a close cousin of the Department of Homeland Security. Ineffective training, under staffing, injuries, lack of communication and extremely low morale have been reported at airports across the nation. It's no different here at Las Vegas' airport, which is the third busiest U.S. airport in terms of origination and destination flights (those that start or end here) behind Los Angeles International airport and (Chicago) O'Hare International, according to McCarran officials. And it's the origination and destination flights, rather than connecting flights, that cause the most amount of work for baggage screeners and passenger check points. This has bred a culture of workers always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Many screeners contacted for this story said they wanted to talk, but were afraid for their jobs. Even with the promise of anonymity, most shied away from speaking out about the behind-the-scenes problems they face. Many McCarran screeners say they are fed up with low pay (those interviewed for this story made between $12 and $14 per hour), expensive health-insurance premiums, working mandatory overtime, lack of training and exhaustive physical work. "If you don't manage things right, people leave," said a baggage screener, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. "I know last year we were loosing five to six people a week from quitting. And it was just insane. And now we're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people who can pass the tests. It's kind of ugly." In December, Baltimore Washington International airport TSA passenger screener Ron Moore aired some of the agency's dirty laundry in the Washington Post. Like those at McCarran, Moore started with the TSA when it began. (BWI was the first airport in the nation to have TSA security, beginning in the spring of 2002.) In the Post piece, Moore, 44, pointed out the agency's lack of training time and quality of training received, as well as mismanagement and lack of collective worker rights. TSA screeners are required to have 44.5 hours of classroom training before starting the job, followed by 60 hours of on-the-job training before becoming certified and then a mandatory three hours of training each week. Moore said he received less than the three requirements each week. Also, 30-minute briefing sessions at the beginning of shifts would be counted as training by management. Moore is president of the Local 1 of the American Federation of Government Employees. The union is open to all government workers, but Local 1 is specifically for the TSA. Moore said there are a number of Las Vegas screeners in the union. Those screeners could not be reached by press deadline. "I felt that Congress needs to get involved," Moore said, about why he went to the media with his complaints. Before going to the media, Moore said he tried to communicate with management. He wrote letters with his grievances. For instance, he said, he wrote management a letter about issues of racism toward black workers. At McCarran, Linihan said he never witnessed any kind of discrimination but said favoritism and cronyism is rampant. Since the Post piece ran, Moore said he has felt reprisal from management. He is up for recertification in a week and has been told in so many words that he might not pass. "I've just been told that I have to be really careful to do really well," Moore said. "I've had a lot of attention paid to me. Some of the trainers are understandably unhappy with me. ... I've had a few occasions where trainers have apparently been assigned to watch just me and step up and correct me as I'm doing my job." Moore, like Linihan, said he first thought there might be issues with management when he got a call one night that his schedule was changing starting the next day. "That was my first hint that they could basically manage the workforce in any way they wanted to, with or without a reason," Moore said. "In other words, they didn't need to change my schedule; I was the only one they moved. It didn't really affect anything either way. There was a need to shift things around from time to time just because they could." The TSA is still struggling to find its security weaknesses while fixing its internal employee relations problems. In the spring of 2004, reports submitted to the House subcommittee of aviation security and the General Accounting Office showed that the TSA ranks poorly in many areas. In September 2004, USA Today reported that undercover investigators were able to sneak explosives and weapons past screeners at 15 airports. Likewise, in December the Associated Press reported that baggage screeners at Newark Liberty International airport found a fake bomb planted as a training exercise -- but then failed to prevent it from making the flight to Amsterdam. Locally, the anonymous screener said he has witnessed egregious errors under the old federal security director that allowed unscreened baggage to make it onto airplanes. He said he saw a lead supervisor working a screening machine without watching the monitor. When bags were being flagged for search, the screener saw the supervisor hit a button to allow it to go through unsearched. "He [was] hitting the clear button without even looking at the screen and doing his paperwork," the screener said. Protocol requires all the luggage that goes through the machine to be unloaded from the airplanes and searched again, but that never happened. Clark said, "Every bag that goes through McCarran is screened. Every checked bag is screened." But this alleged incident highlights a problem that screeners bring up often. There are rules to be followed, but only when the airport isn't busy. And when screeners see their managers breaking the rules, it isn't long before the bad habits trickle down. Sometimes, bags may look suspicious -- but if they haven't been flagged through TSA procedures, manager approval is needed to open them. "What happens is, we get so busy that a manager won't give you approval unless you force the issue, which can be very difficult," the anonymous screener said. "They cut corners because they're so busy and so understaffed and they don't want to make issues out of stuff. I've run into a lot incidents where I'll say, 'I don't care if it creates more work. I'll do the work.'" Pressure from the airlines and passengers to keep things moving along added to the problem. "They [TSA] tried to tell us not to worry about the airlines. But the airlines really didn't help the situation either. They were trying to run a business," Linihan said. One issue is that some airline companies have scapegoated the TSA for baggage-handling problems. Also, some airlines have cut baggage-handler staff (known as "swampers") and put pressure on TSA workers to throw bags on conveyor belts after screening, something that is not their responsibility. "When we came in, boy, that was a nice little thing for the ticket agents because then we had to swamp all their bags," Linihan said. "We got to this point where we were noticing that they didn't like us because we maybe held things up once in awhile -- but [at] the same time, we saved their bodies in the bumps and bruises and fatigue." But Clark said the airlines and the TSA are working together. "Don't forget we regulate the airlines under ... ATSA," he said. "So it's a relationship, a spirit of cooperation, but also one where they understand that we do regulate them." As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day. But metaphorically speaking, the TSA was. It was a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the inadequacies of the old airport security systems became shockingly apparent. Many of those hired in the first wave of TSA crews understood that the infant government agency wouldn't be perfect. Another screener still working at McCarran said he had high hopes for the job and the agency when he started in the fall of 2002. "At first I thought it was great," said the screener, who requested anonymity. "I thought we were doing a lot of things right and I thought we were going to continue to progress to do things right." One of the biggest complaints from screeners is under-staffing -- stemming from budget caps, injury, low morale and high turnover. "There was just too much work for too little people," Linihan said. "... They lost too many people for [because of] bad management." The TSA staff at McCarran is around 800, while in Los Angeles it's about 2,200. TSA spokesman Nico Melendez cautioned against comparing the two -- but at least one local screener said the disparate numbers between the two airports have hurt morale. Melendez said, "This is something we need to be very clear on: We're congressionally mandated at a cap of 45,000 screeners nationwide, so we are in a constant state of shuffling and reshuffling our resources because as new technology is placed into one airport [the number of employees needed changes]. So we are constantly re-assessing our need." Melendez did not have specifics regarding McCarran staffing issues, such as how many screeners are on the injury list, how many are former military personnel, the ratio of men to women, or the average age of the workers. "When Congress created us as part of ATSA, displaced airline employees and former military were -- in the law -- given priority for these jobs and we did a very effective job of getting former law enforcement, former military, former airline employees all in here," he said. "I think if you were to do a survey of our screener workforce, you would be very surprised at the type of people we have working for us from people with Ph.Ds to [those who] used to be a checker at the supermarket." One rumor among current screeners at McCarran is that as many as 100 people are on the injury list, further reducing the available workforce. One factor unique to Las Vegas is the number of well-paying jobs available to those without college degrees. The area's relatively low unemployment rate has hurt local TSA recruiting efforts. "At one point in time we were understaffed," said Clark. "We were moving towards the mark we wanted -- but given the economy in Las Vegas, it's very difficult at times to bring people on who want to stay on this job. So we've moved now to ... I guess we're getting closer to our goal of full staffing as we would like it, and those numbers are increasing every week." But what is full staffing? Clark and Melendez refused to be pinned down to a specific number. "We don't really stick to a specific number, but I can tell you we're in the 800-neighborhood-range of screeners," Melendez said of Las Vegas. "With attrition rates and an increase of flights at different times, it really, really depends on how many people we have working at the airport at any particular time." Nationwide, TSA's attrition rate is around 20 percent. Melendez wouldn't comment on specifics for McCarran. However, TSA officials are happy to discuss that its 20-percent rate is far lower than the private screener attrition rates before TSA was created. In July, the Seattle Times reported that in 1987 Seattle airport-screener turnover was about 100 percent and in 1999 it was as high as 126 percent (meaning that the entire workforce changed and partially changed again in a year's time). Melendez said before the TSA, attrition was more than 300 percent at some airports. The future looks to be busy for the TSA at McCarran. The airport has been chosen as one of 16 model sites to test and research new technology. At least one type of new technology, which Melendez would not disclose, will be coming to the airport this year for testing. McCarran's passenger volume set records each month in 2004 (except January). In December, the airports passenger count hit 40 million before the end of the year, the most ever in one year. It is only expected to continue to climb. The UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research's Index of Leading Indicators showed a 12.3-percent increase in last quarter's passenger tallies over the same period last year. Clark, who worked as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent for more than 20 years and is a Vietnam veteran, said the biggest challenge for McCarran is its passenger volume and inadequate space. "McCarran is a very large operation. I think right now we're one of the largest airports in the world as far as originations and destination flights. So the volume is great. Certainly, volume is a challenge because we are inhibited by capacity both for our lanes that we operate as well as our equipment, so that's an issue." At the same time, Las Vegas' potential as a terrorist target may be rising. It is one of four major cities (the others being New York, L.A. and Washington, D.C.) that could be terrorist targets this year, according to a Jan. 12 Newsweek story that cites National Security Agency sources. The crews of exhausted screeners are hoping that Clark, 58, who came to McCarran in November after serving as the deputy assistant administrator for aviation and as the FSD in El Paso before that, will be their savior. Some screeners have hard feelings about the former FSD. "Hopefully, this new FSD will square things away -- but who knows," said the anonymous screener. And regardless of any possible changes in the future, there will still be those like Linihan who wish things could have turned out differently. "As a whole, a lot of dreams were crushed there," he said. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
