At the direction of Trump appointee Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security announced March 7 that it is ending collective bargaining for roughly 47,000 transportation security officers who are employed by the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA). The workers are represented by American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).
The statement also trash-talked the union and slammed public employee collective bargaining rights.
“Transportation Security officers are losing their hard-earned dollars to a union that did not represent or protect their interests,” the department said. That’s a thoroughly dishonest statement, because by law, union dues are strictly voluntary for federal workers — dues are only paid by workers who choose to do so.
Collective bargaining is also a “bureaucratic hurdle,” the department said, one that has “constrained TSA’s chief mission” — keeping Americans safe. Eliminating it “will strengthen workforce agility [and] enhance productivity and resiliency, while also jumpstarting innovation.”
Going forward, the agency says it’s repudiating the union contract it signed in 2024, and it won’t allow workers to use the payroll system to pay union dues. That cuts off dues payments to the union from about 24,000 represented workers for now (though not from the roughly 2,000 who had made arrangements to pay dues directly to the union).
On March 13, a coalition of unions filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Seattle seeking to block TSA from repudiating the contract it signed. The plaintiffs are AFGE, AFGE’s TSA Local 1121, Communications Workers of America (CWA), and Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. They argue in the suit that TSA’s actions are unconstitutional retaliation against AFGE for exercising its First Amendment right to advocate on behalf of federal workers, and that they violate the Fifth Amendment by stripping TSA workers of vested rights without due process.
“Transportation Security Officers show up at over 400 airports across the country every single day to make sure our skies are safe for air travel,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley in a March 7 press statement reacting to TSA’s announcement. “Many of them are veterans who went from serving their country in the armed forces to wearing a second uniform protecting the homeland and ensuring another terrorist attack like Sept. 11 never happens again. Today, Secretary Noem and the Trump administration have violated these patriotic Americans’ right to join a union in an unprovoked attack.”
Passenger screening used to be the responsibility of airlines, which contracted it out as low-wage work done by private security companies. After terrorists armed with box cutters hijacked four planes on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress federalized airport security. The law created the TSA but left it up to the TSA administrator to decide the extent to which employees would have collective bargaining rights. Under president George W. Bush, they were given no collective bargaining rights, but after limited rights were granted under President Barack Obama, TSA workers voted to unionize in 2011. The 2016 Republican platform called for TSA workers to be stripped of collective bargaining rights, but President Trump didn’t act on that in his first term. President Joe Biden raised pay and expanded TSA workers’ collective bargaining rights in 2021, and in May 2024 they got their first collective bargaining agreement, a seven-year deal that would have run through 2031.
