New Airport Screener Jobs Going Mostly to Whites
The federal takeover of aviation security is spurring a demographic shift at airports around the country, as thousands of screener jobs in which minorities were heavily represented increasingly appear to be going to whites.
Statistics from the Transportation Security Administration indicate that Latinos and Asian Americans are finding it particularly difficult to land the new, higher-paying federal screener positions. As of mid-September, a majority of the 21,983 new hires were white.
At issue are a citizenship requirement for federal screeners and a preemployment test that the current workers allege is discriminatory.
The TSA “is not as diverse as my expectation was,” said Rep. Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.), a member of the House panel that oversees aviation security funding. “They need to look at their hiring practices and say, ‘We’re coming up short.’ ”
The agency, however, says it is pleased with its efforts to hire minorities. “We’re right on target, and in some cases better,” spokeswoman Heather Rosenker said. She defended the preemployment test as an objective assessment developed by experts in the personnel field.
The TSA has yet to take over security screening at Los Angeles International Airport, where minorities account for an estimated 98% of the security screeners. All are employees of private companies. African Americans make up about half the work force; Latinos, 20%; Asians, 14%; and Africans, 14%, according to the Service Employees International Union, which represents the workers.
The emerging TSA security force looks substantially different. Federal screeners are gradually replacing private security employees in a transition that is supposed to be completed by Nov. 19.
Nationally, whites account for 61% of the federal screeners, while 21% are black, 10% Latino, 2% Asian and 1% American Indian, according to TSA statistics. This month at the St. Louis airport, African American screeners shut down checkpoints for 10 minutes to draw attention to their complaints that they were being left out of the new federal jobs.
The TSA has also encountered problems hiring female screeners. It initially set a goal that half the workers would be women, in order to address reported abuses by male screeners searching female passengers. Yet only 31% of the new hires are women.
There are no figures on the ethnicity of screeners before the Sept. 11 attacks, but a former Federal Aviation Administration security chief said the work force was overwhelmingly made up of minorities.
“I was in a lot of airports, and it sure seemed that way to me,” said Cathal Flynn, who headed the FAA security branch from 1993 to 2000. “I remember one of the senior managers in the FAA saying, ‘I’ll know those are good jobs when I see white guys working in them.’ He himself was black.”
SEIU researcher Robert Masciola agreed. “At the top 100 airports, which employed 80% of the screeners, I would definitely say it was a majority-minority work force,” said Masciola, who assisted in the union drive to organize the workers at eight of the nation’s largest airports.
The new TSA jobs pay $23,600 to $35,400 a year, plus benefits. The private security screener jobs often paid minimum wage.
“This is not the same job,” said Elizabeth Kolmstetter, a TSA official who oversees training standards for the new work force. “The job screeners knew previously is not the same job TSA is putting out there. We need a work force that can keep up with change.”
Many of the job requirements were set by Congress and cannot be changed by the TSA, said Rosenker, the spokeswoman.
For many Latinos and Asians, a key barrier to TSA employment is that Congress required the agency to recruit only U.S. citizens. Other federal agencies--including the Defense Department--do not have to apply such sweeping citizenship rules. About 31,000 noncitizens are on active duty in the armed forces, enough for a couple of Army divisions. Legally, none of them could be a federal airport screener. An amendment pending in the Senate, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would waive the citizenship requirement for current screeners who are permanent U.S. residents.
Another barrier, say union officials at LAX, is a battery of preemployment tests that includes a ninth-grade-level English exam.
Of 120 LAX screeners who recently volunteered to take a practice English test, all flunked. Union organizers said they’re concerned about the relevance of the exam to a screener’s job.
“What’s getting a lot of people is the diction, which is very subjective,” said Javier Gonzalez, an SEIU organizer. “This is currently predominantly a people-of-color industry.”
National civil rights organizations complain that the TSA has not done enough to reach out to minorities.
“We’ve been extremely frustrated, because we’ve had a couple of meetings with TSA about the need to do some targeted advertising, and we have not gotten much in the way of cooperation,” said Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.
“I think it’s important for the employees to look diverse, because that will take away from the stereotype that the people doing the searching are all going to be white and the people being searched are going to be people of color,” she added.
Responded Rosenker: “Our advertising schedule shows we are in ethnic publications.”
At LAX, new federal security director David Stone has been adamant that he wants to retain as much of his current work force as possible.
“My current screening force is my family,” Stone said at a recent orientation meeting in which he explained the hiring process. Screeners now at LAX are employed by private companies under contract to the federal government.
“You’re the ones protecting us day in and day out,” Stone told the screeners. “I desperately want to retain every one of you.”
He faces long odds. At least 40% of the 1,200 current screeners are not U.S. citizens, ruling them out as candidates for the federal work force.
From a security standpoint, the citizenship requirement is “strange,” said former FAA official Flynn. At overseas airports--where the terrorist threat is generally acknowledged to be higher--U.S.-bound passengers are routinely screened by foreigners, Flynn pointed out.
“Overseas, including in places like the Middle East, we have to rely on foreign nationals as screeners, and their backgrounds are checked by foreign governments,” Flynn said. “It is strange that we have this insistence on U.S. citizens, but we’re only doing it in the United States.”
Citizenship appears to be only one dimension of the problem.
“A citizenship test by itself should not justify a low number of Latinos,” said Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the National Council of La Raza. “Roughly 60% of Latinos are born here.”
Union representatives, who spent three years organizing screeners at LAX, allege that the TSA exam and its English test are discriminatory. Lower-income minorities will be replaced with middle-class retirees and law enforcement officers, they allege.
“We are concerned with what’s happened at other airports--the drastic demographic shifts,” said Maria Loya, director of public policy for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. “We definitely wouldn’t want to see this happen at LAX. The majority of current screeners are coming from communities that are very impoverished.”
While Congress mandated that federal screeners be proficient in English, it left it up to the TSA to decide how best to accomplish that.
Other federal agencies do not employ such a standardized English test, said Rusty Asher, a spokesman for the federal Office of Personnel Management. Instead, they check employment and educational history, and interviewers then make a judgment about whether a job candidate has the needed oral and written English skills.
The TSA test requires job candidates to read at the ninth-grade level or higher, said Stone, the agency’s security director at LAX.
Dan Wagner, a literacy expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said that requirement is too high for most people who are not native speakers.
“The average reading level of adults in the United States is eighth- to 10th-grade,” Wagner said. “If you look at people who are not native speakers, I would guess that level would be two grades lower.”
English proficiency requirements for becoming a citizen are much less stringent, Wagner added. “By having a high English requirement, [the TSA] may be cutting out some people who could be quite adequate at the job of security,” he said.
The TSA adopted the requirement after considerable study, said agency official Kolmstetter. Screener positions are now considered technical positions, not blue-collar jobs. “It is a skilled work force reading requirement, as opposed to an unskilled work force,” she said. “There is a lot more reading required on the job.”
Stone and officials at the Los Angeles city agency that operates LAX are offering English classes for current screeners in the hopes of boosting their chances.
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Alonso-Zaldivar reported from Washington and Oldham reported from Los Angeles.
