As Trump tosses out the TSA union contract, everything is on the line.
The most important thing about a union contract is that it is a contract. It is a legally binding agreement. It is not a passing fancy. It is not an empty promise, a public relations ploy. It is a contract. It is a guarantee. The things that are laid out in the contract are guaranteed, for the length of the contract. Abiding by its provisions is mandatory, not optional.
This is a bedrock principle. It is why working people fight so hard to, first, win a union, and then—more fighting—to win a fair contract. The contract makes all of that effort worthwhile. Why? Because it is the ineradicable manifestation of what you have won. You may have struggled, and marched, and endured threats and retaliation, and poured years of energy into organizing, and a big reason why you kept going through all of those hardships is that you knew that once you won your contract, you would get what is in the contract. For well over a century, workers and bosses have fought bitterly over whether workers can have unions, and what those unions can do, and what is fair or unfair to put into contracts, but all of those battles are framed by a shared understanding that what goes into the contract is very important because contracts, once agreed to, are real.
Less than one year ago, tens of thousands of TSA employees who are members of AFGE signed a seven-year union contract. Today, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced that “it is ending collective bargaining for the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Transportation Security Officers.” In other words, just tearing up the contract. DHS didn’t even really try to put a fig leaf of legality on this action. The agency said bad things about the union— “The union has hindered merit-based performance recognition and advancement—that’s not the American way,” for example—but did not say anything that sounds like a genuine legitimate argument for why they feel they can just exit a collective bargaining agreement six years before it expires. They just want to, so they say they are. That’s all.
Right now, these workers—and, by extension, all union members in the federal government, and in the public sector, and in the whole country—find themselves in a situation that is like being in a fourth floor apartment that is on fire. As the flames approach, you look out the window. It’s a long way down. Do you want to jump out of the window? No, but the alternative is burning up. So you have to jump, and hope that you survive. If you do not jump, you can be sure that you will not survive. You have two bad choices, but one of them is decidedly worse
TSA workers have something going for them that most of their federal government peers who have been illegally laid off in recent weeks do not have: The fact that the Trump administration wants them to keep working. All of the workers at all of the federal agencies who have been canned by DOGE would be within their moral rights to strike, but their leverage is not great—to strike is to deny your labor to your employer, and if your employer doesn’t want your labor, your strike does not create a great deal of pressure. But the TSA? The government needs these people to continue working. Otherwise, air travel will grind to a halt, and that is an extremely serious matter. If airport security workers do not show up to work at even a few big airports, a crisis is created within a matter of hours that ripples out across the entire nation. To shut down air travel is a big, big deal. It very quickly creates a huge amount of anger among travelers, and a huge amount of pressure on the government to fix the situation. Fast. Workers who are critical parts of the aviation industry have a large amount of natural leverage. That is why the industry is one of the most highly unionized in the country. It is also why the government created special laws to restrict those workers’ ability to strike. The government knows damn well that any strike that shuts down airports is something that it cannot easily wave away. Workers who are chokepoints in air travel have too much inherent power, and that is why their right to strike is reined in.
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