Support unionization for TSA workers through the AFGE! To hell with Jim DeMint!

[Bluebear]

http://tsa.afge.org/

Labor stands by you, TSA!

======

The latest incident could step up pressure on the Senate to confirm President Obama's nominee for TSA administrator, Erroll Southers.

The assistant homeland security chief at Los Angeles International Airport, Southers was approved easily by two Senate committees this fall, but Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is holding up his nomination in a dispute over whether TSA's 50,000 screeners should be allowed to unionize.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2009-12-27-terror-attacks_N.htm

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. Fuck No, Abolish the TSA and prosecute its former employees where necessary

Nothing contributing to the further permanence of the TSA should be tolerated,

[Bluebear]

2. That's right, toss tens of thousands of front line workers out of their jobs asspickle

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

4. I wouldn't hesitate for a second, their human vermin.

They all know what they are part of - their only purpose is to keep the american people in a perpetual state of stupid paranoid fear. Further all TSA employees past and present should be investigated for any participation in civil rights violations, thefts or other crimes.

[Bluebear]

7. No, "their" not. Blaming frontline employees, shame on you and /ignore.

"Their"!

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

8. "orders are orders" right? they know who they serve - decent people would refuse.

The TSA is a magnet for petty authoritarians dripping wet for power in any form and the otherwise unemployable, fire the whole lot of them.

A minimum of 75% of the entire department of homeland security hired under Bush should probably be terminated too.

[spoony]

9. This sort of cartoonish caricaturising is not helpful.

Airports need security personnel. Those jobs are necessary. And I'd prefer they be union jobs, how about you? That's what this thread is about.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

10. I don't mind if their union, I just don't want it to be the TSA

Unionize the TSA and they will be all the more difficult to get rid of - the organization is rotten from the screaming douchebag at the airport to the career republican think tank entourage at the top.

[spoony]

11. That's like saying that the UAW makes changing GM management harder.

Pols make those decisions at the top, we're talking about--as Bluebear pointed out--front line workers. I know people who worked airport security before and after it was TSA. The things you're talking about, workers getting busted for stealing etc, seemed to occur with the same frequency before as now. That stuff happens government or not, union or not. While I don't like the TSA's top rung decisions at all, the vast majority of TSA workers are just doing a job. They don't install scanners that humiliate people or enact any other TSA policy.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

12. So the TSA trains people to be belligerent and verbally abusive?

The difference here is the work the TSA does is intensely appealing to a certain type of authoritarian anti-social personality, while say working for GM would appeal to the mechanically inclined.

I flew 100,000 miles this year, my patience with this organization is shot.

[babylonsister]

3. Another rethug holding up the nomination. This sucks, but isn't a surprise.

DeMint in particular. That's what he does.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

5. Broken clock moment, Erroll Southers is a bag of shit.

who has abused authority in every position he has ever held, a perfect fit for the TSA culture - but unacceptable none the less.

[pitohui]

6. don't see how the "latest incident" reflects on TSA--the failure was at Schipol

the TSA wasn't screening the flights, AMS security screened the flight -- a cheap pat down and/or a quick use of the swab would have stopped the young man from getting on the plane

AMS owns this screw-up

[Kievan Rus]

13. TSA agents don't deserve to be unionized

[Bluebear]

14. you probably don't deserve employment either, karma being what it is

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

15. if the subprime mortgage schemers were to organize...

and call themselves the International Brotherhood of Retail Mortgage Professionals they and their criminal activity would find a passionate defense around here,