TSA screeners missing work hits 10%

Transportation Security Administration officers work at a check- point at O’Hare airport in Chicago earlier this month.
Transportation Security Administration officers work at a check- point at O’Hare airport in Chicago earlier this month.

WASHINGTON -- The percentage of Transportation Security Administration airport screeners missing work has hit 10 percent, more than triple the rate of a year ago, as the partial government shutdown stretches into its fifth week.

The TSA said Monday that the absence rate on the comparable Sunday a year ago was 3.1 percent.

The workers who screen passengers and their bags face missing another paycheck if the shutdown doesn't end early this week.

According to TSA, many of them say the financial hardship is preventing them from reporting to work.

Airport screeners are in a category of workers including FBI agents and border patrol officers who are considered "essential" and therefore required to work without pay during the shutdown.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump praised federal employees working without pay, saying on Twitter, in all capital letters, "Thank you -- you are great patriots!"

TSA said the national average waiting time in airport checkpoint lines is within the normal limit of 30 minutes, but there are longer lines at some airports.

The worst delays were reported at the main airport in New Orleans, though TSA said 99.9 percent of passengers waited less than 30 minutes.

The agency has dispatched extra screeners to LaGuardia Airport in New York, as well as to airports in Atlanta and Newark, N.J. A TSA spokesman said other airports might also be getting additional help.

Sunday's 10 percent absence rate topped the previous high of 8 percent set Saturday. It indicates that more than 3,000 airport screeners missed work.

TSA has 51,000 screeners, and a spokesman said that about 33,000 work on any given day.

With fewer screeners, TSA closed one of its security checkpoints at Baltimore/Washington airport over the weekend, then reopened it, but closed it again Monday afternoon, according to an airport spokesman.

A checkpoint at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport remained closed. An airport spokesman said lines were relatively short at the other six checkpoints.

TSA said that on Sunday it screened 1.78 million passengers, and only 6.9 percent -- roughly 120,000 people -- had to wait 15 minutes or longer to get through security.

No figures were yet available for Monday, but websites or spokesmen for several major airports including Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago's O'Hare reported normal security lines and few problems.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which had some of the longest lines in the country last week, reported waits of 15 to 30 minutes at domestic-travel checkpoints Monday. Los Angeles International Airport showed most lines under 20 minutes.

A few airports -- San Francisco's being the largest -- conduct screening with government-approved private contractors, not TSA.

A long government shutdown and more TSA sick-outs could lead other airports to consider going private, although that hasn't happened yet.

TSA got a break because of bad weather: Storms in the Midwest and Northeast led airlines to cancel more than 4,400 flights over the three-day weekend, which reduced the number of passengers to screen.

The holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. is also not as busy for travel as many other three-day weekends. However, inconvenience could become a crisis for the travel industry the longer the shutdown lasts -- and there are few signs of movement by Trump or congressional Democrats to break the stalemate over border-wall spending that is causing the shutdown.

"Presidents Day weekend is much bigger, and then spring break and Easter -- those are really important," said Savanthi Syth, an airline analyst for Raymond James. Washington's Birthday -- popularly called Presidents Day, and celebrated in Arkansas as George Washington's Birthday and Daisy Gatson Bates Day -- is Feb. 18, and Syth said if the shutdown drags into next month it could cause some passengers to cancel travel plans.

The union that represents the TSA workers, the American Federation of Government Employees, has warned since the federal shutdown began that its employees are among the lowest salaried on the federal pay scale and simply may be unable to make the commute to airports if stranded without a paycheck.

"The fact of asking, or in fact demanding, that people continue to come to work and not receive something and have no idea whether they even will receive back pay in many cases is an absolute killer for morale," said Erin Bowen, a psychology professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's Arizona campus.

"Any time you have these situations where people feel like they have no control over their work environment and no control over whether their effort receives payment, you're going to see really wide-ranging consequences, and some of them are going to be bordering public safety concerns," Bowen added.

Rolland Vincent, an industry expert, said TSA agents have a vital job to do, and their work, along with that of the Federal Aviation Administration, is being undercut by the shutdown.

"We're exposed," added Vincent, who is also co-chairman of the Transportation Research Board's subcommittee on commercial aviation. "Somebody is going to get hurt."

Information for this article was contributed by David Koenig of The Associated Press; by Chris Strohm and Alan Levin of Bloomberg News; and by Ashley Halsey III and Michael Laris of The Washington Post.

A Section on 01/22/2019

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