I have the union movement and workers on my mind and their place in the public imagination - if the public imagines them at all - and how to get them there.
My worry persists about the Kool-Aid the Los Angeles Times has drunk, recently exemplified by its columnist Sandy Banks in her newspaper's assault on public school teachers. More that the Times is pulling the Jim Jones Kool-Aid Drinking Game and making the rest of us imbibe their venomous attacks on the LA public school system and its teachers. But the union movement also strikes closer to my proverbial home and makes me think of the TSA officers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), among whom I work. The public must not imagine us too well if you follow the conventional wisdoms.
When President George W Bush started the US Dept of Homeland Security and TSA he argued that allowing collective bargaining for the agency would inhibit its security function. Most of the Democrats, not to be outdone, allowed this travesty. TSA employees are the only federal workers denied collective bargaining rights. The seven terminals at LAX are run like little fiefdoms, the TSA officers the mere vassals of their immediate supervisors and managers.
Fiefdoms, the whims of a chain-of-command who might or might not know how to manage, flexible workforce are some of the results of TSA officers - and any wage-worker in this country - not having collective bargaining.
And what is so bad about collective bargaining? Has collective bargaining inhibited the Border Patrol or CIA or the Coast Guard from fulfilling its functions? I am unfamiliar with the campaigns to strip these agencies of union rights. I have not heard any Republicans or Democrats run for office to end unions in the federal system or bash unionized federal workers, like the LA Times enjoys punching our city's teachers.
I have not heard much about the unfair, arbitrary treatment of TSA employees, the long, two-year probationary period, the ridiculous and transparent "incentive" program, which we are all forced to sign into, which no TSA officers finds fair. I fought this program last year when asked to sign up for the current fiscal year. I refused to sign, made my arguments that I'd rather opt-out and take my chances with the standard federal raise. I was told my job was incumbent on me signing. Then, why am I signing?
I had hoped Obama's "Change is coming" mantra might mean a deep, purging sweep of TSA upper echelons and the implementation of fairer rules for TSA officers and the beleaguered traveling public. No such luck. When I put the question of a certain local high official to Jane Harman [D-California], weapons-lover, on a local radio station she seemed amazed. She said she'd heard nothing but good things about the official I asked about. She was undoubtedly following newspapers of record and not talking to TSA officers. I knew then without a doubt that Harman was ripe for plucking from her Congressional office if not her committees.
Since my tenure began at TSA, the officers job responsibilities have increased. Our pay has not. I know a bit about this from my 10 years as a public school teacher, where our own class sizes increased; but I had a union UESF to fight for us. TSA has none.
A union would address this and tell TSA to pay for its work. Then TSA officers and the traveling public will see how really necessary some of these things really are.
Where might you read about the plight of the workers, those 6 million who have lost their lost jobs and those who still hang on to theirs? Not the papers of record. You will not read favorable things about unions and unioinzing in the Los Angeles Times, which is the paper whose owners also want a flexible workforce, which means the ability to hire and fire as their balance book dictates. You won't hear this from politicians, like Harman.
The AFGE*, AFL-CIO, SEIU, IWW, Teamsters, Retailworker websites are considered unfavorably biased, yet the corporate sponsored LA Times is esteemed as objective and trustworthy. Denied the ability to speak to the Press, denied a Union to speak for us, all the public hears is what comes from the TSA management: What they have told the public is a mixture of lies and propaganda. What they have told the public flies directly in the face of the low-morale TSA officers have.
Any newspaper on a campaign against working people is an anti-social cretin, a vile toxin poured into the community well.
As newspapers are forced to revamp their business models, we should look back at a history. An array of news sources, strongly taking disparate positions, once existed. The Morning Star of the UK is the only full-service Marxist daily newspaper I know of in the English language.
The struggles of those who labor, the workers, the underemployed, those to whom the land should belong [to quote Paulo Freire] needs a newspaper, a news agency, with a Labor Section more than a Business Section.
Joe and Suzy Public don't want disaffected, underpaid teachers educating their children in swollen classrooms with no support, or the children of their neighbors and community. I would hope they wouldn't want the TSA officers hired to protect their flights similarly disgruntled and overburdened. TSA officers aren't yet disgruntled. But they are weary and cynical and according to the federal governments own surveys the most disaffected employees in the federal workforce.
I tell my colleagues a Union will set workplace rules but it won't keep TSA from hiring incompetent managers. In a country where Bonzo's monkey can be president for two terms, anyone can be a TSA manager. Some are promising; many seemed to have won their positions in a lottery. A union will set a known, fair pay rate for our work but it won't stop some of the ridiculous security measures, under-staffings, under-resourcing, which functionaries paid to do nothing else hand down from Mt. Ignoramus. But the place to have these debates is in public, and the public must be informed.
(* For the record, I do not belong to AFGE, the union that has fought for TSA union rights since the founding of the agency)
For more info: American Federation of Government Employees * American Federation of Labor- Congress of Industrial Organizations * Service Employees International Union * International Brotherhood of the Teamsters * Industrial Workers of the World * Retailworker Forum * United Educators San Francisco * United Teachers Los Angeles. * TSA Screeners Union
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