Transportation agency hires 44,000 screeners; union aims for them

The Transportation Security Administration met a congressional deadline to federalize passenger screeners at the nation's 429 major airports, hiring more than 44,000 employees in the last year, Bush administration officials said Monday.

After Nov. 19 last year, when President Bush signed the bill creating the TSA, federal officials mounted a massive hiring and training effort that culled the agency's workforce from a pool of 1.4 million candidates. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta hailed the feat as the largest peacetime mobilization in the nation's history.

"We did it," Mineta said at a press briefing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington. Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge and TSA Director James Loy appeared with Mineta at the briefing.

The announcement means that as of Tuesday morning, federal employees will have replaced contractors in security jobs at all major airports.

The claim of success came as representatives of federal labor unions started a formal process to organize the passenger screeners. The American Federation of Government Employees filed a petition Monday with the Federal Labor Relations Authority to create a bargaining unit at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the first airport in the country to have a federalized screener workforce.

If the authority approves the petition, the screeners would vote on whether to join the union. Peter Winch, an AFGE organizer, said a "couple hundred" of the more than 500 screeners at the airport have signed cards that call for an election. Under federal labor law, at least 30 percent of affected employees must express a desire for union representation before an election can take place. Winch said union representatives have also started gathering signatures at Tampa International Airport and will follow suit at other airports in the order in which the TSA federalized the screener workforce. Bush administration officials have not yet said whether they would oppose unionization. The administration fought efforts in the Senate to protect union rights for employees in the proposed Homeland Security Department, which will almost surely absorb the TSA. But Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James and others have said that the Bush administration is not out to bust unions. In addition to dealing with the union issue, TSA leaders are trying to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to examine all checked baggage for explosives. Loy said Monday that the agency will hire additional employees to screen baggage. The agency is also trying to streamline passenger screening so that some of the agency's new employees could be diverted to the baggage effort, which will be labor-intensive until explosive-detection technology is deployed.