Trump Administration strips TSA workers of right to collectively bargain
The Department of Homeland Security unilaterally terminated the collective bargaining agreement that covers 47,000 TSA workers who provide aviation security at more than 400 U.S. airports, leaving the agency’s airport workers without a way to negotiate for improvements in salaries and working conditions.
TSA workers, represented by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), signed the seven-year agreement in May of 2024. It was the first comprehensive collective bargaining contract secured by TSA workers. It came amid a push by Homeland Security to improve the pay of frontline workers and brought the agency’s contract more in line with those of other federal agencies.
The AFGE said the action was retaliation by the Trump Administration for their efforts to defend federal workers from being unlawfully fired and was an attack on all workers.
“This is merely a pretext for attacking the rights of regular working Americans across the country because they happen to belong to a union,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley.
“This is the beginning, not the end, of the fight for Americans’ fundamental rights to join a union. AFGE will not rest until the basic dignity and rights of the workers at TSA are acknowledged by the government once again.”
Trump’s action is the worst anti-worker and anti-union presidential action since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers represented by PATCO.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 55,000 Flight Attendants, said the unilateral move was “PATCO on steroids.”
“First and foremost, this is sending a message to the rest of corporate America that contracts don’t matter- that you can just rip them up. This is going to have reverberations that everyone feels,” Nelson told Salon. “Canceling the collective bargaining agreements is an attempt to get us all to work for less.”
She called the action an “egregious attack on workers’ rights that puts us all at risk.”
Trump’s action also tracks with Project 2025, which called for ending collective bargaining rights at TSA. During the campaign, Trump disavowed and claimed to “know nothing about” Project 2025 and that he has ‘no idea who is behind it.”
The cancelling of the CBA is without precedent, may well be illegal, and will be litigated in the courts. Whether or not the CBA cancellation is stuck down by the courts, the action adds to the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity across the federal workforce.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director and Project 2025 co-author said in October that he wanted to “traumatize” federal workers. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.” One-third of federal workers are military veterans.
Transportation security officers (TSOs) interviewed by Labor Notes reporter Jenny Brown described how quickly working conditions were rolled back once the CBA was cancelled and workers were left without union protections.
“The creep and the rot is coming back quickly,” said Lowell Denny, a TSO in Austin, TX, who has worked for TSA for twenty years. He said workers were being told by management not to call in sick.
“They’re back to the old tone: ‘We’re watching you,’” he said, recalling how, before workers had a contract with seniority rules, managers would “give their favorites prime schedules.”
“In San Diego, the assistant federal security director was laughing to the employees and kind of taunting them, like, ‘Hey, you don’t have a union anymore,’” said Bobby Orozco, president of TSA Local 1260 in Southern California. “There’s absolutely no grievance procedure.”
The collective bargaining rights of transportation security officers were expanded under President Joe Biden. Since that time, TSA has seen attrition rates drop nearly in half. The termination of the CBA will likely reverse the progress of retaining qualified transportation security officers.