More TSA agents refuse to work during shutdown
The partial shutdown of the federal government is starting to affect air travel as a growing number of security agents are refusing to work for no pay.
So far, however, the impact on air travelers has been relatively limited with no significant disruptions. But airport workers and travelers are concerned that conditions will worsen if the impasse continues, throwing travel into turmoil.
At least one airport, Miami International Airport, will start closing one terminal early each day, starting Saturday, because of a shortage of screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration, said Greg Chin, an airport spokesman.
Chin said agents had been calling in sick at double the normal rate this week, leaving their supervisors worried that they will not have enough agents to operate all of the airport’s 11 security checkpoints.
The nation’s 51,000 airport security agents are among the federal employees who have been ordered to work through the partial shutdown, which began Dec. 22. On Friday, they missed their first paycheck since it started, a lapse that their union leaders feared would cause more of them to stop showing up for work or even to quit their jobs.
Hydrick Thomas, president of the TSA Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, said this week that “extreme financial hardship” had driven some of his members to resign and many others to consider doing so.
The agents earn about $35,000 a year, on average, union officials said. “We have people that work from paycheck to paycheck, and there’s quite a few of them,” said Vincent R. Castellano, national vice president for the union’s second district, which encompasses the Northeast.
Near Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, a churchsponsored food pantry has been delivering food to TSA workers, said Jessica Whichard, a spokeswoman for the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina. Whichard said the White Oak Foundation had requested more food than usual from the food bank so that it could distribute some to airport workers.
The workers, many of them still in their TSA uniforms after finishing their shifts, showed up to collect food at a makeshift pantry the foundation set up in a parking lot near the airport, said Kathleen Lee, director of services for the foundation. She said the foundation would continue offering food to federal employees twice a week at the White Oak Missionary Baptist Church in Cary, North Carolina, for “as long as necessary.”
Lee said the workers were not sheepish about accepting the handouts. She said one of them told her, “If I’m getting free groceries, then I can pay my light bill.”
Despite the shutdown and the hardships it is causing security agents, federal officials said that passengers had not faced any major problems navigating security checkpoints. Following the holiday rush, the air travel industry is entering a period where the number of people flying is generally lower than during other parts of the year.
But if the shutdown persists, the worry among industry officials is that agents will face pressure to find paying jobs elsewhere, leading to staffing shortages. Security officers at airports around the country were already expressing increasing anxiety about their financial plight.
“It is getting harder to come every day and know that you’re not getting paid, but it’s my job, and I knew when I started this job that this was potentially going to happen,” said a 37-year-old woman who is a screener at Los Angeles International Airport. “So I’m going to come in, but if there is any other reason that I have to call out, I’m not going to hesitate to do it.”