‘Don’t Privatize Airport Security’ Say Screeners and Flight Attendants on 9/11 Anniversary

Union flight attendants are mourning lost co-workers on the 25-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks. In Chicago today, they’re joining with Transportation Security Officers to defend airport security gains made in the last quarter-century.

“I was there. I lost my friends,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “Our union made a sacred promise to ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated.” She described the Trump administration’s attempts to privatize airport security as a danger to the public as well as the 55,000 members of her union.

At the time of the September 11 attacks, airport security relied on a patchwork of private contractors, “driven by corporate bottom lines and cost-cutting,” Nelson wrote in a July letter to Congress.

“We don’t have to theorize about what that may look like because we have been through this before and witnessed the devastating and deadly consequences,” said Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley on July 21, after a new privatization scheme, TSA Gold+, was revealed.

With the creation of TSA in 2001, all workers became direct employees of the federal government, with uniform standards across airports. The workers unionized in 2011, becoming members of AFGE Council 100, which now represents 47,000.

ATTACKING THE UNION

Since coming into office in 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to get rid of the union at TSA, and privatize airport security. Union members say the administration is following the plans laid out in the right-wing Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.

Darrell English, president of AFGE Local 777, said rich contracts are being dangled for tech companies to come in and replace workers. Local 777 represents 2,500 Transportation Security Officers at 19 airports in Illinois and Wisconsin.

“They’re giving these contracts to these billionaires for their technology,” said English, a lead officer with 21 years at the agency. “And that technology is going to reduce the staffing levels at airports for TSA officers.

“It's all about gaining that money, the financial contracts, through TSA,” he said.

Kelley called the privatization plans a “major departure and step backwards from the aviation screening security system that Congress created in the wake of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.”

Nelson wrote to Congress urging rejection of David Cummins, a nominee for TSA director who is committed to privatization and opposes collective bargaining at TSA. Cummins was confirmed by the Senate 51-47 on August 7.

PARTIAL WIN

The unions notched a partial win when Cummins backed down from “TSA Gold+,” much touted by the Trump administration and his predecessor, Ha Nguyen McNeill.

AFGE leaders said they only learned about the TSA Gold+ program from the press in July, even though it had been in development for many months. When the government didn’t respond to a request for relevant documents, AFGE sued for their release.

The program would have allowed airports to completely privatize their security operations, including bringing in their own equipment. “TSA Gold+ would have put private contractors in control not only of security screening functions but the screening technology itself,” said Nelson.

But airport managers were skeptical. Only three airports seemed to be on track to implement it, in Tampa, Des Moines, and Charleston, South Carolina. Then the largest, Tampa International Airport, announced August 24 that after a months-long evaluation, it would be sticking with the existing TSA workforce.

That same day, Cummins announced the end of TSA Gold+, but privatization plans would go forward under a new scheme: Horizon 25 Strategy. It includes expanding the small, already existing Screening Partnership Program (SPP), where screeners work for a private company. The largest airport to use it is San Francisco.

The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget would cut thousands of TSO jobs. According to the union, the budget would eliminate 14 percent of the workforce, or 8,400 positions. The administration’s plan, the union said in July, is that private contractors would replace 4,500 screening workers “through a proposed mandatory expansion of the Screening Partnership Program to include all small and non-hub airports.”

Only 20 of the country’s 440 commercial airports now use private screening under the SPP, which was rolled out in 2004. But that would expand to 220 under the administration’s proposal, the union reported.

MAKING STABLE JOBS

It’s taken nearly 25 years to make airport screener jobs stable and livable. First there was a decade of organizing to win union representation for TSOs, and then in 2012 they secured a contract. Then in 2023, under the Biden administration, the TSA workforce was finally included in the federal workers’ pay schedule. Some got a pay bump of 30 percent. (Federal worker unions do not negotiate their pay; it is set by Congress.)

The new pay scale reduced turnover, which had been the worst in the federal government at 20 to 25 percent a year.

But when Trump came in for a second term, he went on a full-on attack against federal unions and declared void AFGE’s contract with TSA. In January, a judge halted the administration’s latest attempt to cancel the contract, which runs through 2031.

“We had the contract taken away from us numerous times,” said English. “Then you had the shutdowns. And now privatization. It's all a continuation of one thing after another.”

During the government shutdowns this spring, airport screeners went for as long as six weeks without pay. Many couldn’t get to their jobs, struggling to pay for gas or childcare. The worker shortage meant airports became snarled and tense with long lines.

Screeners “are still recovering from the shutdowns that occurred in April because of the devastation, the financial devastation they were put through,” English said. Some workers are still not sure they ever got their correct back pay. “It got to the point where after the second [shutdown], people stopped really checking. It was too hard to find out exactly… so, they cut their losses short,” he said.

“It still left a bitter taste in their throat… and the fact that they don’t understand how things are going to work out in the future, especially with this Horizon 25 plan,” English said. Some workers felt the instability was too much and left for other jobs.

It’s also a deterrent to recruitment, he said. “A lot of people don’t want to get into the agency because of the possibility of that occurring again.”

The administration has used the backed-up traffic during the shutdown to argue for airport security privatization, since privatized employees workers would be paid by a long-term contract with the federal government and wouldn’t be affected by periodic shutdowns.

This is a ruse, because the government could have paid the screeners during the government shutdowns, but chose not to. In fact, in March, after six weeks, the administration ordered them paid even while the shutdown continued.

Today at Chicago’s Midway Airport, TSOs and flight attendants will commemorate. They’ll also argue for a public, unionized workforce to run airport security.

English said that unity across unions will be essential to win. “We’re going to need to bond together to be able to push back on a lot of things that are being rolled out. TSA alone is not going to be able to do it. But together, I’m sure that this could be fixed.”