TSA Screeners Union Hopes Passengers Protest Petty Rule Change That Only Affects Screeners

The union representing Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners is trying to enlist passengers in its fight against petty rules that don’t improve safety. It just so happens that none of those rules have any effect on the flying public. 

Late last month, TSA’s politically appointed leadership ordered that the chairs that TSA agents normally sit in while they give your driver’s license the stink eye be removed. 

Agents’ standing posture “reinforces both our security posture and our commitment to hospitality,” wrote Steve Lorincz, TSA’s executive assistant administrator for security operations, in a September 25 memo, parts of which were shared by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that represents TSA screeners, in an email. 

The union is not taking the loss of its members’ chairs sitting down. 

“That is not leadership. That is a punch line. Hospitality is not something you get by making working people stand at a podium until their feet go numb,” said AFGE president Everett Kelley in a statement that Panagram ranks as 100 percent AI-generated. 

The union argues that there’s no security study showing that standing agents are more effective. 

It is now encouraging the flying public to join its “Take a Stand” campaign and sign their names to a form letter demanding the return of the chairs. 

The chair fight comes amid a persistent labor dispute between the second Trump administration and TSA’s unionized workforce. 

Last year, the administration attempted to unilaterally end TSA workers’ collective bargaining rights, citing low worker satisfaction and the high percentage of staff time spent on union organizing. 

A federal district court judge blocked that attempt in January. 

TSA agents also had to work without pay during the government shutdown last year and the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, in which TSA is housed, earlier this year. 

Government Executive reports that the same day that TSA ordered security checkpoint chairs taken away, the Trump administration also appealed the district court ruling blocking its termination of collective bargaining rights. 

Meanwhile, the union continues to oppose the Trump administration’s expansion of the Screening Partnership Program, which allows airports to hire private, non-TSA screeners to run airport security. 

As it happens, privatization of airport security screening would spare screening agents from one of their most persistent beefs: having to work without being paid during government shutdowns. 

It would also eliminate the existing conflict of interest whereby TSA is charged both with regulating and operating airport security. 

It would nevertheless clearly be bad for AFGE, as airport security checkpoints would not have to be staffed with members of its union. 

(Marc Scribner, a transportation policy researcher for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website, argues that the SPP is far from perfect, in part, because it gives TSA too much power over which contractors airports hire.) 

AFGE’s inability to distinguish between its own interests and those of travelers is made laughably clear by its attempt to gin up public support for the return of its chairs. 

The union might well be correct that there’s security improvements to be had by requiring agents to stand. It’s correct enough when it says that “a boarding pass reads the same at any height.”

If that’s the case, however, one still wonders why the public would care at all about whether the agents they interact with are sitting or standing. 

In the 25 years since 9/11, passengers have been subjected to endless amounts of intrusions and indignities at the hands of government agents. TSA screeners union reps have generally stood by silently as we put up with water bottle bans, erroneous groin pat-downs, and unnecessary REAL ID requirements. 

So long as security theater only affects passengers, it would seem the union doesn’t care all that much. It’s a bit rich, then, for the union to expect passengers to care about another petty requirement that doesn’t, at the union’s own admission, affect them in the slightest.