FliesWay2Much

Title says it all. These are the random no-notice "golden flow" testing that all federal employees have to do every once in a while. I think it's only happened to me 3-4 times in 40 years. These tests are not the initial employee screenings that everyone knows about in advance`.

Hundreds of TSA workers failed drug, alcohol tests.

Gotcha', Nico. We're ready to believe you.

These numbers are meaningless unless you normalize the percentage of employees tested per agency. We don't know how many part-time employees are included in the TSA numbers. They also have a bloated headquarters staff. I'd like to know how many screening employees get caught every year.

Boggie Dog

Also not known is how many TSA employees were tested. Do they test 1%, 5%, or how many and are those test equally distributed between all airports? Did they mix in any new hire tests just to skew the results? Would be interested if the HQ Executive Staff are exempt from these kinds of things?

FliesWay2Much

It would be interesting to cross-reference the substance abusers with screeners who were also caught stealing from passengers or helping the big druggies get around the checkpoints.

...and, I wonder how many of them were air marshalls or other TSA "cops"?

Boggie Dog

Yes, some details would be very enlightening. Of course I'm sure that information is labeled SSI.

Pesky Monkey

Just as an aside, not all federal employees are subject to drug testing. Only certain drug testing designated positions.
Personally, I'm thinking the TSA people that failed the tests are not the ones barking, grabbing crotches, and stealing iPads.

N830MH

Precisely! They could stealing the money from the those passengers. That's a problem. They are going to jails. I don't like what they doing. They will be terminated at work. You no longer work at TSA. The behaviors is not acceptable.

Section 107

Not a good headline and I am not defending TSA at all, but lets keep this in perspective. That is an average of 143 per year out of a workforce of ~55,000 or .0026% per year.

That might be a reasonable rate considering the size of the workforce and the bulk of that workforce is blue collar. Yes, yes, I know, zero tolerance is the only acceptable rate because first responders, first/last line of defense, apple pie, motherhood, and of course they "...must be right 100% of the time," blah, blah, blah. But I suspect there are few workplaces that have lower rates of employees failing random screenings or having issues with substance abuse.

jkhuggins

But TSA isn't most workplaces, by its own admission. If TSA continues to promote the rhetoric of "not on my watch", "last line of defense", etc., then it invites criticism for any non-zero failure rates in any form of testing.

gobluetwo

Do you have the same attitude toward police departments and other LE organizations?

Wouldn't any organization which touts things like integrity also invite the same level of criticism for any non-zero failure rates in any form of testing? (which I think is completely unrealistic)

On the article and headline, very click-baity. You're aghast at the prospect of "hundreds" failing the drug tests, until you realize it's over 7 years and it's barely one half of one percent of the total workforce. They lead with the sensational, but the comment that their rate is about 1/3 of that of other federal employees is a complete throwaway comment buried in the middle of the article.

I am not defending the TSA, by the way, rather bashing the sensationalist and alarmist headline - I'd feel that way whether it's about the TSA or anything else. Clearly, someone came out of the "will clickbait for money" school of gonzo journalism.

chollie

(bolding mine)

No.

Any organization that relies on zero tolerance to the point of stupidity and hostility towards the folks it serves because it pretends those folks are all guilty should be held to equally high zero tolerance employee conduct policies.

WillCAD

I don't disagree with you chollie, but we also have to acknowledge the fundamental difference between zero tolerance, and zero failure.

If TSOs who fail the random drug screen are, indeed, automatically fired as the article states, then to me that indicates a true zero tolerance policy - fail your pee test, and you're gone. No exceptions, no appeals, no judgement calls or discretion, just a pink slip.

Zero failure, on the other hand, is impossible to achieve in any large workforce, blue- or white-collar. We all know it, whether we admit it or not. And I don't think that it's fair of us to take TSA to task for failing to achieve the un-achievable.

If they lacked a zero-tolerance policy and let TSOs get away with drug use and abuse on the job (as some other federal workforces do) with nothing but repeated slaps on the wrist, I'd be highly critical.

If their non-zero failure rate was significantly higher than the federal average, I'd be highly critical.

But they have a zero-tolerance policy, and according to the article they have a failure rate that's 1/3 of the federal average. So I'm not going to castigate them for actually being better, in this particular criterion, than the rest of the behemoth federal bureaucracy.

I'd rather castigate them for their total disregard for Constitutional protections, repeated violations of Congressional orders and federal regulations, persecution of whistle-blowers, multiple instances of work blatant slowdowns as a budget negotiation tool, continued reliance on already-debunked pseudo-science, and total lack of ability to achieve any sort of consistency in screener training, even with a horrendously expensive new national training academy.

We should criticize them for wearing cop uniforms and calling themselves "officers", not for the color of their shoes.

Boggie Dog

TSA asserts that it's employees are all vetted and can be trusted. Yet time, and time again, we see that that's just not true. We don't have a choice if we use TSA or not so I think TSA has to be held to a much higher accountability standard. Illegal drug use cannot be tolerated by TSA and I agree with the pop positive = fired policy. Perhaps the frequency of testing needs to be increased.

chollie

WillCAD, the point I was making is that I have zero sympathy for employees of an organization that punishes what appear to be 'minor' infractions of known rules when those same employees have no problem taking a 'zero tolerance' attitude towards hapless pax who are trying to follow unpublished 'rules' that are nothing more than what the screener in front of them says they are, a guessing game that always leaves the pax on the losing side.

We're far more at risk from a drunk/drugged TSO (many many opportunities for error) than we are from a single pax who gets his genitals manhandled just for not knowing that 'snacks' have to be removed for inspection at some airports.

jkhuggins

I'm not going to compare TSA with a police department, because that sort of comparison only makes it seem like TSA is equivalent to a police department. They're not, and they shouldn't be seen as one.

I agree that non-zero failure rates are unrealistic. But, as others have already pointed out, TSA says that it must do its job absolutely perfectly, all of the time, lest something horrible happen. That rhetoric is used to justify all sorts of abuses of passengers at checkpoints who, believe it or not, don't always perform their self-screening of personal property absolutely perfectly before they enter a checkpoint. If TSA is going to enforce that standard on passengers, it should enforce that standard on itself.

I would be the first person to cut TSA a break on matters like these, IF it toned down the parallel rhetoric it uses towards passengers. I don't engage in schadenfreude, but I do want consistency.

And TSA engages in exactly this sort of click-baity journalism every week on its own blog, where it publishes the number of firearms it confiscates, without any sort of context as to the number of passengers who came through a checkpoint without a firearm. (Or, as I'm sure others will point out, any sorts of estimates as to the number of firearms it probably missed at checkpoints that week, as reflected by their own published tests.)

Again: consistency. If TSA doesn't like having its statistics quoted out of context, it should be the first to quit doing that itself.

rickg523

I suspect sensationalism.
If they set the baseline low enough, they can claim a fail on someone who smoked a joint 3 months ago. Or walked through a room where a joint was being smoked last week.
Is that important? Any more important than a guy having a beer last week?