Airport screeners question pay policy

Some airport screeners at the Transportation Security Administration claim agency officials broke faith with them by not honoring salary promises.

For the past five months, a group of screeners at Boston's Logan International Airport have relentlessly pursued what they understood to be a promise of a salary comparable to what they earned as screeners working for TSA contractors. The screeners point to a document on the Labor Department's Web site describing the assessment and hiring process for TSA screeners as proof that the agency is unfairly paying them less than what they were promised.

According to the document, "if an individual is offered a job, it will be at the same salary he/she had with the previous security contractor within the pay band."

"It's not really about the money; it's the fairness," said Andrew Kluttz, a TSA screener in Boston who says he feels betrayed by agency officials. "A promise made is a promise kept."

Created after the Sept. 11 attacks, TSA is charged with screening passengers at the nation's 429 major airports. TSA officials and contractors spent much of last year vetting, hiring and training a 54,000-member workforce that by law had to be up and running by November. Part of that training included explaining the agency's paybanding system to its workforce, TSA spokesman Brian Turmail said.

"We have been quite clear in explaining a complex federal pay structure to our screeners," Turmail said. "Ultimately, each salary compensation package was shown to a screener as they came onboard."

Under paybanding, the 15 grades of the General Schedule are usually merged into four or five salary ranges. Within those ranges, managers typically have more freedom to set salaries than they do under the General Schedule, which limits managers to 10 salary options in each grade. At TSA, salaries range from $23,600 to $35,400 annually, plus locality pay.

According to Turmail, the Labor Department document did not promise screeners a salary matching their previous contractor-paid salary.

"If they are hired at a band lower than their past pay, they do not-as is clear in the document-receive matching pay," Turmail said. "We have specific pay scales we have to adhere to and our compensation packages are very generous, significantly better than what screeners in the U.S. were making before Sept. 11."

According to the group of screeners at Logan, when they were offered positions with the agency, they signed offer letters guaranteeing them "matching pay," but never received copies of the letters. According to Kluttz, he and other screeners have been asked several times to provide copies of the letters, as well as old pay stubs to substantiate the "matched pay" claims, but attempts to get copies of the letters from NCS Pearson, the former contractor that handled hiring for TSA, failed. "They said, 'We'll get 'em to you, we'll get 'em to you'," Kluttz said. "We advised the TSA on this when we got to our locations and they opened up a hotline and all this, but I've seen no real effort to provide the letters."

In December 2002, Kluttz-who sent letters and email messages to lawmakers, TSA headquarters officials and Transportation Department Secretary Norman Mineta-did receive a salary increase to approximately $31,000 a year, but he said that is still slightly lower than what he had earned with the TSA contractor. Another Logan screener said his base salary of approximately $27,500 is less than the $33,000 salary he earned before joining the agency.

"That is to me, and most others with bills and financial responsibilities, a significant amount," said the screener, who asked not be identified for fear of retaliation. "This is simply unbearable and unacceptable."

This lingering pay issue has hurt morale among many Logan screeners, Kluttz claims.

"As a matter of honor, our agency should not have allowed so much time to pass on these issues of common sense and employee fairness," he said. "Many of the newer screeners hearing of our problems now believe they will be treated with even less respect. Too many are losing faith in our important daily mission."

Earlier this month, the American Federation of Government Employees said it would try to unionize airport screeners, to help address complaints of low morale, cronyism, management missteps and other issues.

Turmail insisted agency officials are committed to resolving employee issues, and pointed to the agency's addition of an ombudsman as evidence of that commitment.

"We are working on [TSA Administrator James Loy's] vision of a model workgroup," Turmail said. "We want every employee in the position where he can focus on one thing-his job."

TSA has a range of venues available to address personnel-related questions, Turmail explained. Screeners with questions or concerns about their pay and benefits should first contact their human resources representative at the airport, and if that doesn't solve the problem, they should call Accenture, TSA's HR contractor, which maintains a toll-free phone number. Finally, screeners can report problems to the ombudsman.