This week’s effort by the Senate to grant collective bargaining rights to the country’s 34,000 airport baggage and passenger screeners will cause longer security lines and compromise anti-terrorism efforts, Republicans said Tuesday.
“It would be detrimental to the safety and security of the American people,” Sen. John Cornyn,R-Texas, told reporters.
He and other Senate Republicans had just finished lunch with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who warned that such a move would undermine the department’s efforts to screen passengers and their luggage in a thorough and efficient manner.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who heads the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, said that the Transportation Security Administration has avoided “enforcing the most basic employee protections.”
As a result, TSA has seen “unusually high rates of attrition, vacancy, workplace injury, discrimination complaints and other indications of employee dissatisfaction,” said Lieberman, whose committee approved the unionization measure earlier this month.
The TSA estimates that the changes would cost the department $160 million to hire labor–relations specialists and negotiators, employ union stewards, and train employees and managers about the bargaining process. That’s equivalent to 3,500 security officers or 300,000 security screenings per day.
Republicans accused Democrats of pushing through the measure as a favor to unions, which overwhelmingly support Democrats. “The TSA ought to be a first line of defense in the war on terrorism, not a vehicle for political payback,” one Senate Republican said.
Majority Leader Harry Reid dismissed the accusation.
“All I can say is I believe we are [supporting] the views, goals and aspiration of the working men and women of this country,” he said.
Republican staffers told The Examiner Tuesday that the White House will issue a veto threat as early as today if the Senate approves the unionization measure.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., reminded reporters Tuesday of the last time a Democrat insisted on giving collective bargaining rights to TSA screeners, back when Congress created the Homeland Security Department in 2002.
Later that year, Democrats lost seats in the November elections, at least in part because of their insistence that the officers be given collective bargaining rights. Among those to lose in 2002 was then-Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, who was defeated by Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
Chambliss accused Cleland of opposing anti-terrorism efforts because he refused to vote for the creation of the new department unless it included the union provisions.
“It was about national security then, and it’s about national security now,” Chambliss said Tuesday.
