SHE IS 19 YEARS OLD. SHE STILL lives with her mother. She is paid $ 9.24 per hour for her job at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Terminal Seven, where she is America's principal line of defense against terrorism. And as of September 11, everyone in America wants to know what she and her co-workers -- operators of metal detectors and X-ray machines, devices that are the bane of impatient passengers' existence and a crucial link in an airline-security system that suddenly looks ineffective and vulnerable -- are doing wrong and why.
Her days, which begin at 2:30 P.M. and end at 11:00 P.M., are filled with frustrations -- brought on, she says, by rude passengers and often-contentious relationships with her supervisors. The screener, who asked not to be identified, graduated from high school but, after having a child, temporarily postponed plans for further education and took a job with Argenbreit, a security firm that United Airlines uses at LAX. She is a member of the Service Employees International Union; LAX is one of only a few airports in the country with unionized security personnel.
Though the screener argues that her salary is not adequate -- "A lot of people's lives are in our hands, and we're just getting nine-something an hour?" -- she reserves her harshest complaints for her managers. She describes a work environment where employees feud with their supervisors, rules are enforced more strictly when inspectors from the Federal Aviation Administration are present, and confusion about basic procedures -- such as when a passenger should be asked to remove a belt or jewelry -- is common.
"I think the problem is that they've got too many managers," she says. "They even confuse themselves, I think."
Blanca Gallegos, a spokesperson for SEIU Local 1877, says the problem is that "many times the supervisors and managers at the checkpoints really just have a few more months' experience than the people they're supervising." And this particular screener, who has been on the job for 10 months, is already a veteran employee: At LAX, says Gallegos, the average screener lasts just nine months. At other airports, the turnover rates are even worse.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Manhattan and Washington, D.C., there seems to be widespread agreement that something needs to be done to lower turnover rates and, in general, to improve the job performance of airport security screeners. There are, in broad terms, two schools of thought on how this might be accomplished.
The first would leave the framework of the current system intact but implement changes designed to raise wages and decrease turnover among security screeners. Union organizers, who have backed such reforms, advocate making publicly controlled airport authorities responsible for hiring security firms rather than entrusting that responsibility to airlines (as is currently the case). They point out that airports would be less likely than airlines to farm out security contracts to the lowest bidder. And they further argue in favor of unionizing employees, noting that when airport personnel enjoy higher wages and better treatment at work, turnover rates are likely to decline.
The more radical option -- and the one that would dramatically change the airport-security industry -- would be to federalize airport screeners and make them law-enforcement agents. This is the approach favored by the airlines themselves, as they made clear in recent testimony before Congress. It is also drawing support from Democratic leaders Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt, consumer advocates, and academics of varied backgrounds.
Paul Dempsey, a law professor at the University of Denver and director of its program on transportation law, says that "security personnel at airports should be law-enforcement personnel and they ought to have the ability to make arrests if need be." He points out that airport authorities -- while perhaps less cost-conscious than airlines -- are not immune from the desire to save money. As a result, he argues, it doesn't matter whether airlines or airports do the choosing: Contracts will still go to security firms with underpaid employees and high turnover rates.
Princeton economist Elizabeth Bogan asserts that it would be important to see such a measure for what it is: a subsidy to the airline industry. But given that the industry may be sliding toward bankruptcy, she believes that such a subsidy "might be one of the better ways to save the airlines." But, she adds, "the problem of the airlines going bankrupt is, I think, a short-run problem, not a long-run problem."
Less-tentative support comes from the Aviation Consumer Action Project, which was founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1971. "We don't have Wackenhut guarding our southern border," says Paul Hudson, the group's executive director, referring to the private security firm. "I don't think we have time to experiment with another privatization effort."
But Jono Shaffer does not completely agree. He argues that security can be improved without federalization. Shaffer is the deputy director of the building-service division for SEIU -- the largest union in North America and the one that recently unionized screeners at airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco. SEIU has won passage of living-wage laws within airport authorities and has negotiated new contracts that considerably improved benefits and wages. Three years ago, screeners in both cities made $ 6 per hour; they now make $ 9.50 in Los Angeles and $ 10 in San Francisco. Coupled with improvements in health coverage, sick leave, and vacation pay, those changes should lead to lower employee turnover -- and, at least in theory, safer flights. And according to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, turnover rates among San Francisco screeners have indeed fallen -- from no percent in 1999 to 25 percent today -- since wages went up.
For Shaffer, however, increased wages are not the main benefit of unionization. After all, he points out, "we can figure out how to legislate wages . . . without a union." The real security benefit, he argues, is that screeners are no longer afraid to speak up when something goes wrong with the equipment or the security process in general. Built into the contracts that SEIU negotiated in Los Angeles and San Francisco are specific clauses that protect whistle-blowers. "Anybody that works knows that those who speak up face reprisals -- and that's where the strength of a union contract makes a difference," he says. "Workers have to have the unfettered and guaranteed ability to speak up without fear."
Bogan notes that unions could help the situation. "Unions that are sensitive to the issue of working well with their employees sometimes do good things for morale," she says, and they might therefore be able to improve the job performance of security personnel. But she also cautions that if unionization leads to disputes between management and employees, it could harm the cause of improving security.
Stephen Lerner, director of SEIU's Building Services Division, says that unionization of airport-security personnel would move America closer to the European model, in which private firms take charge of airport security but often pay employees (who are unionized) far higher wages than their U.S. counterparts do. For instance, he notes that airport screeners in Frankfurt make $ 30,000 per year -- roughly twice the annual income of anyone receiving the American minimum wage.
According to both Lerner and Shaffer, SEIU doesn't, per se, oppose federalization. It simply believes that any plan to federalize all security screeners is unlikely to take effect in the near future, if ever -- which is why the union is focusing on ways to address problems within the industry's current framework.
Sweden, which uses a model similar to the one SEIU favors, provides an example that points to the benefits of such a system -- but also to the pitfalls of replicating it in the United States. At Sweden's largest airports, security screeners work for private firms, but unlike in America, those firms are hired by airport managers rather than airlines. Despite this (and despite the fact that most screeners are unionized), screeners in Sweden make about $ 18,000 annually -- little more than those in America do. But they nevertheless tend to stay in the same job for about two to three years, according to Gunnar Harmen, head of security for the Aviation Department at Sweden's Civil Aviation Administration.
So Swedish airports appear to have the best of both worlds: a corps of security screeners that is low-paid but not turnover-prone. How did they do it?
The answer lies in Swedish culture and economics, says Nina Ersman, a press counselor at the Swedish embassy in Washington, D.C. Ersman explains that Swedes simply don't change jobs as often as Americans do. "Marginal differences in income don't play a very big role," she says, noting that because taxes are so high and expensive programs (such as higher education and health insurance) are paid for by the government, Swedes in general are less likely to bounce from job to job in search of better income. And when it comes to airport-security screeners, that disincentive for social mobility has a beneficial -- if unintended -- stabilizing effect.
America's economic culture, of course, is quite different, which means -- whether through federalization or less ambitious measures -- the United States is going to have to do what Sweden does not: give its security screeners an incentive not to leave their jobs by paying them more. It's just a matter of how.
