Gift cards show concern for unpaid TSA agents at O’Hare
“I hope one of the silver linings of this is that people start to realize that government employees do important things. This is the government. These people.” — Barbara Brotman, who with husband Chuck Berman persuaded leaders of Oak Park Temple to have a gift card drive for TSA agents
Chuck Berman was buying gift cards, a whole lot of gift cards, at a Walmart a couple of days ago when his credit card was declined and his phone sent him a fraud alert.
The credit card company had spotted suspicious activity. Already that day he’d spent $4,000 on gift cards at Jewel. Now he was buying 145 more? This was not normal behavior.
But we are not living in normal times. It is not normal for the federal government to be partially shut down for a month. It is not normal for hundreds of thousands of government employees to live without a paycheck. It is not normal for many of them to go to work anyway.
It’s so abnormal that Chuck, his wife, Barbara Brotman, and other members of Oak Park Temple felt called to help.
But how? It’s a question many of us have asked as we watched the shutdown drag on, dragging workers down with it. What could we do?
Their answer: gift cards for TSA agents at O’Hare.
“My heart went out to the TSA workers,” Barbara said Friday, shortly before the announcement that the government would be reopened for three weeks while negotiations proceeded. “They’re so low-paid to begin with, and now, to be forced to work without pay — it’s appalling. I wanted to help them at least a bit — and to show them that the public cares.”
Barbara — who, like Chuck, is a former Tribune colleague and a friend — had heard a report on National Public Radio about a temple in Chattanooga, Tenn., that had bought gift cards for TSA agents. She suggested the idea to the leaders of her temple, and on Wednesday, the temple announced the gift card drive on its website, along with two pertinent commandments from the Torah:
From Deuteronomy: “On his day you should give him his wages, the sun should not set on it, because he is a poor man and his life depends on it ...” From Leviticus: “You shall not leave (with you) the payment of a worker overnight until the morning.”
Within 24 hours, from temple members and others, the donations had topped $7,000. “Clearly,” Barbara says, “there was an enormous hunger to step up and help.”
Barbara had been warned that navigating the federal bureaucracy to put the plan into action would be hard. She phoned the TSA public information office. Closed due to the shutdown.
Eventually, through a relative who works at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., she connected with someone who works for the TSA in Chicago who explained the rules: An agent couldn’t accept cash or a gift card that was the equivalent of cash. A gift card had to be from a specific store. And the limit was $20.
Twenty dollars might not pay a mortgage, but it would be symbolic and it would be a help.
“Twenty dollars could buy a lot diapers,” Chuck says. “Or breakfast cereal. Twenty dollars is not going to change somebody’s life, but maybe it makes it a little more comfortable. And maybe these $20 add up.”
On Thursday, he headed out to buy the cards. Jewel cards, Target cards and, finally, Walmart, where, at the counter, he was informed he couldn’t buy that many gift cards at once. The issue was taken to a manager. The manager was wary.
“Through our synagogue, we raised a bunch of money for the TSA workers,” Chuck explained.
“OK,” Chucks recalls the manager saying. “That’s a good story.”
The manager pulled a clerk over, and one by one she filled out the forms for 145 Walmart gift cards, many of which said “Love,” mostly because Chuck didn’t want the ones that featured puppies.
And after he explained the situation to his credit card fraud department, he came home with the gift cards.
Despite Friday’s announcement that the shutdown would be at least temporarily suspended, Chuck and Barbara headed to O’Hare on Friday evening to hand the cards over to a TSA supervisor, who would deliver them to agents, who weren’t likely to see their back pay for a few more days.
“I hope one of the silver linings of this is that people start to realize that government employees do important things,” Barbara says. “This is the government. These people.”
And in that silver lining is the recognition that we depend on them, and that there are many people who want to say thanks even if they’re not sure how.