Summary
Trump is revoking collective bargaining rights at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), ending union protections for thousands of airport security officers.
The Department of Homeland Security claims the move will improve efficiency and security, but unions argue it is a retaliatory attack on federal workers.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) plans to challenge the decision. TSA workers fear the rollback will worsen working conditions and retention.
The policy reverses union rights granted under Obama and expanded by Biden.
The TSA never provided any tangible increase in airport security. DOGE could have started here.
Yeah, planes have been falling out of the sky pretty regularly lately without assistance from terrorists.
My love for unions eclipses my hatred for the TSA on this one.
TSA is way more like mall security than police tho.
ACAB all the way, and TSA is little more than a hollow performance, basically security flavored LaCroix that ought to be abolished as genuinely wasteful and needlessly degrading and inconvenient to travelers.
But I don’t really see TSA agents as cops. I’m sure the line blurs in some specific cases, but they’re not going around murdering people with impunity like cops do.
Sort of my feelings here. This isn’t like the FBI or CIA that actively go around trying to fuck people over. Airports wouldn’t function if they acted like that and politicians LOVE to fly.
But also, the TSA is a place we need to defund and mostly dismantle. There’s no reason an airport needs so much security theater other than it makes rich people feel good. They need about as much security as a subway does (not much).
That said, they aren’t first on my list for “defund the police”. That honor belongs to ICE.
Pretty sure you misunderstood op. They’re saying their hatred of TSA is overshadowed by their love of unions meaning they think this is bad because as the other person said, harm to one union harms all unions.
Pardon my ignorance, but how does this even work? Like, don’t they just walk off the job collectively until someone is willing to negotiate with them?
That’s how unions are supposed to work. It’s really the only bargaining chip workers have, at least until we can all be 100% replaced by ai and robots…
Americans are so corporatized that they mistakenly think the power of unions comes from the government
Which is pretty effective propaganda.
Union busters have spent a lot of money to make it feel that way.
And that’s exactly why they’re in some part right. If you have enough money to buy scabs, and protection for the scabs, the union relies on the government making that illegal.
It’s the break down of the pact. At a small scale anyway - obviously the longer it goes on and the further they go with the busting attempts, the more union actions will cause ripples in other industries, and solidarity movements. They can’t buy protection everywhere, and if they try, it’s escalation all the way to the bloodshed that wrote the pact in the first place.
Okay, so he revoked the collective bargaining rights. He didn’t revoke the ability to go out on strike, though. It just won’t be an organized strike.
Weren’t strikes the compromise to the other option, namely dragging the owners out of the factory and beating them in the streets? Maybe they just want to go back to the original system.
Just remember:
When beating your boss, use a bag of Florida oranges. They hurt like the devil and don’t leave a mark.
I would so love for every single TSA worker to walk out in protest of this fuckery
