That’s an Airport Security Screening Personnel Happiness Index, to be specific, and to be brief, it sux.  As a colleague recently counseled me, “cheer up; it could be worse.”  So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.

I’ve written before about the Partnership for Public Service report on “Best Places to Work” in the 415 Federal Government agencies and sub-agencies;  DHS and TSA continue to sink to the bottom of the list at #394 and #395 respectively... and that survey was before the government shutdown, when they were not getting paid.  Now, industry expects a 4.5 percent increase in passengers this year but TSA has requested only a 2.5 percent staffing increase in screeners.  Now comes a plan that more than 600 TSOs are being re-deployed to assist CBP and ICE with unrelated, untrained-for  duties enforcing immigration policies at the Administration’s self-induced southwest border crisis.  Recall that TSA is not, repeat, not a law enforcement agency.

I have often used this space to criticize the agencies (TSA and DHS) at the political level where, for example, in its 17 years of existence, TSA has had thirteen (13) Administrators, including six “acting”, making it nearly impossible  to establish coherent and consistent policies, much less a stable managerial environment to make them work.  At every industry conference there’s always one session that tries to describe the most recent TSA reorganization(s) and explain where the last 2 or 3 do-overs went wrong.

At the bottom of the pile are the screeners.  They earn their fair share of  criticism at the operational level as well, but I’ve begun to better understand some of the reasons they don’t always love the work they do, just temporarily tolerate it.  Currently, overall Federal employee turnover rate is about 15%; the  TSA  officer turnover ranges between 30% and 80% in major US airports.  Thus, few career opportunities.  In 2017, TSA hired (up to a three-month process) and then trained more than 9,000 new officers; 20% left within 6 months.  There’s a message in there someplace.

According to the AFGE union, the major reasons are low pay (thus hard to recruit), dangerous conditions (#8 in injury rates for the entire government), few workplace rights, and the constant threat of privatization, which may cost them their jobs.  Further, it’s not a constant work environment – every airport is different physically, operationally, environmentally, and even down to the nature and type of the local passenger and the subset of local TSA management. Add to that the agency preference for part-time workers to match the morning/evening push times, which often translates into many TSOs needing second jobs to support their families.  Conversely for many, this is the second job, while looking for something less stressful in order to join the 80% exodus.

All of this bubbles up at flight time:  more traffic with less screeners facing longer lines, fewer screeners with extended experience while in some cases failing up to 90% of Red Team tests a few years ago.  And lest we forget that critical primary mission of aviation security: as one officer noted in defense of that goal, “we do one passenger at a time no matter how long it takes us.”

Yes – we noticed.