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The leader of a federal labor union called on Congress on Wednesday to investigate whether new pay and personnel policies at the Transportation Security Administration have contributed to rising attrition rates at the agency.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, pointed to a May report by TSA on its three-year-old pay-for-performance system -- the Performance Accountability and Standards System. The report, which Congress mandated last year, said the attrition rate for PASS-covered employees in fiscal 2007 was 21.2 percent, a 0.3 percent increase over fiscal 2006.

"I am deeply concerned by these high attrition rates at TSA, coupled with the low morale documented in the recent Department of Homeland Security employee survey results," Kelley said.

While the attrition rate at TSA has increased slightly since 2006, TSA said, the number was still slightly lower than the 23.7 percent attrition rate recorded in 2005, the year PASS was created. "There are no studies that look specifically at attrition rates as a direct correlation to PASS," the report said. "However, TSA has implemented numerous workforce incentives since 2005, including PASS, career progression, local hiring, and TSO retention and recognition incentives to attract and retain a talented workforce."

But Kelley said the pay and promotion system is widely viewed by employees as not fair, credible or transparent, and results in arbitrary ratings. She said NTEU members have told the union that attrition rates are even higher among the D band transportation security officers -- those employees the public interacts with daily at the airport and relies on to keep the skies safe.

TSA's report indicated that more employees received performance-based increases in 2007, with all employees receiving at least a raise equal to the governmentwide pay increase. The highest performers -- which made up 13 percent of the workforce -- earned the governmentwide raise, a 3.5 percent increase, and a $2,000 bonus. The majority of employees -- 44 percent -- received a rating of "exceeds standards," under which they received the governmentwide increase, a 2 percent increase and a $1,000 bonus.

But, Kelley said, PASS has allowed management too much discretion in determining pay, adding that pay raises are lower than for federal employees under the General Schedule. And because TSA gave raises to many employees in 2007 without increasing the amount of money available for pay increases employees were left with smaller overall bumps.

In March, TSA announced several changes to PASS, including developing new training standards and replacing performance ratings with numeric scores. TSA Administrator Kip Hawley also announced plans to tweak the agency's image testing, which measures screeners' abilities to detect certain images on screening devices.

TSA announced more updates to its image testing policy this week, vowing to align training more closely with actual procedures and give employees three chances to pass the test. Unions have cited serious concerns with the image testing, saying that screeners are often trained and tested using different standards or on different devices.

The American Federation of Government Employees on Wednesday praised the changes to image testing, but still noted some concerns with the policy.

Hampton Stennis, staff counsel for AFGE, said Thursday that one of the union's major concerns is that while the new policy gives screeners three opportunities to pass the test, it does not discount previous failed attempts under the old training and testing procedures. "We have lots of screeners who took the image test and failed it twice," he said. "They're only given one more opportunity with the new training."

Another concern, Stennis said, is screeners can fail the test by "overthreating," or citing concern with too many of the images on the screening devices. But, he said, if national security and the safety of travelers is TSA's mission, then the agency should not be concerned with screeners who are overly cautious.

"In three attempts to revise this test, it's still not giving these people a fair shake," he said. "People are tired of worrying about their jobs when they're supposed to be worrying about security."

COMMENTS

• I work for TSA and I must say that under the circumstances, we have some of the most dedicated employees in government. Unfortunately, most of the comments are true. I have been their for a little over 6 months. I started with 12 TSO'S hired and I am the only one left. The attrition rate is unbelievable. It's unfortunate because we loose good people due to lack of pay, PASS systems and career paths. Our job is to protect our nations transportation system from terrorist attacks. I,e. look for bombs, weapons of mass destruction, knives, guns etc. All of this just for $24000.00 a yr. It's crazy. We look at the Customs folks who pretty much is a duplicate of services from what we do and they start at $45000.00 a yr. That is part of the problem. We cannot keep qualified individuals in our ranks. It's sad because the job is great in itself but, your not compesated for what you do. Employee Posted August 14, 2008 2:44 PM
• Move with your feet, or stop whining. There are many opportunities in the private sector. Too hard to venture out of the nest? warren Posted June 23, 2008 2:57 PM
• Lets see.... low pay, low morale, high attrition rate, low preemployment qualifications, yada yada yada, sounds like civil aviation security is back in the days when it was in the hands of crappy private security contractors. One thing not incorporated here is the failure rate of the TSA when covert testing of their efficacy is performed by other agencies to see what they can slip past them. Is this a result of low morale? Are we indeed any safer? DHS was hastily created out of the failure of our Intelligence Community to share information prior to 9/11 due to competetive rivalries, skewed interpretations of law,lame management policy,inter alia. Rearranging, combining and giving existing federal agencies new alphabet soup designations and placing them all under the umbrella of an expensive uberbureaucracy was a dog and pony show to sooth the wounded psyche of the American Public. DHS should have been designed only as a centralized intelligence analysis agency and clearing house empowered by a mandate that every US intelligence agency and law enforcement agencies at every level, report any discoveries or relevent information to it. In its present form, its mission still seems unclear to itself. Isaac Showalter Posted June 13, 2008 4:52 PM