WASHINGTON–The federal takeover of aviation security is spurring a demographic shift at airports around the United States, 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 pre-employment 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 pre-employment 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 currently account for an estimated 98 percent of the security screeners. All are employees of private companies. Blacks make up about half the work force; Latinos, 20 percent; Asians, 14 percent; and Africans, 14 percent, according to the Service Employees International Union, which represents the workers.
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 percent of the federal screeners, while 21 percent are black, 10 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian, according to TSA statistics. Earlier this month at the St. Louis airport, black 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 percent 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.”
Robert Masciola, a researcher with the Service Employees International Union, agreed. “At the top 100 airports, which employed 80 percent 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 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.
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 percent of Latinos are born here.”
Union representatives, who spent three years organizing screeners at Los Angeles International Airport, allege 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 TSA to decide how best to accomplish that.
The TSA test requires job candidates to read at the ninth-grade level or higher, said David Stone, federal security director at Los Angeles International Airport.
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.”
TSA adopted the requirement after considerable study, said agency official Kolmstetter.