Originally Posted by
oneofthosepeopleyouloveto hate
With all due respect, I think this is the wrong approach, and not just because it would cost me my job! (Nope, I never managed to finish college, although I managed to edit four newspapers over the course of my career.)
TSA, at least at the screener level, simply isn't an intellectually stimulating job. I suspect intelligent people are going to be less content doing repetitive work, compared to duller sorts. In my experience, well-educated TSOs generally move on quickly, or they're miserable in the job.
Simply paying screeners more, or hiring ones with more education, isn't going to produce the desired result. Even highly-paid and highly-trained people are capable of behaving boorishly unless they're given, ummm, INCENTIVE to do otherwise!
For optimal performance, I'd think you'd want to hire people for whom the TSA is the best-paying job they've ever had. Skim the cream of the folks from the fast-food or retail sectors -- they'll be thrilled to double their pay overnight and have decent benefits! Then (and this is crucial) MANAGE THEM APPROPRIATELY! The standard needs to be set by the people at the top, and they need to make it clear that rudeness and retaliatory behavior are NOT acceptable! And they need to enforce the standard by ruthlessly weeding out the bad apples as necessary. People who like their jobs and want to keep them generally will do what it takes, even if it means being nicer than they would otherwise.
The first airport at which I worked actually was this way. The culture of courtesy was such that, given peer pressure and management oversight, even the more uncouth screeners were motivated to toe the line, at least where the passengers were concerned.
Sad to say, this is not true at the airport at which I work now, where a "home court advantage" mentality prevails and the leads often are the first to behave in a retaliatory manner toward passengers.
And as today's leads move up to become tomorrow's supervisors, I foresee things getting worse, not better, unless the American taxpayer and his/her representatives in Washington, D.C., step up and yank the TSA's chain a little!
Actually, I agree with you at the TSO level. I
do think a HS Diploma/GED should be required, but even in that area, I would be willing to listen to opposing arguments. In my experience, TSA has benefited from providing better opportunity than most agencies/businesses to people who have little in the way of paper credentials.
As to intellectual stimulation, your argument has also been used to suggest that cops shouldn't be too highly educated. Those programs turned out to be very problematic. The reality of day to day work is certainly mundane and tedious, and does not require high levels of education or intelligence. The problem is, who do you want working on the day that a real attempt is made to take down an airplane? In the safety/security field, we need to balance the ordinary daily requirements of the job with the unusual/extreme requirements of the job.
I am more interested in seeing TSA reform internal recruitment and promotion policies than initial hiring. TSA still benefits from a large number of overqualified people in the screening workforce, although less so than in 2002. They have little in the way of objective requirements for the lower levels of promotions. (It's all on
www.usajobs.gov if anyone wants to check for themselves.) I would like to see more serious requirements for promotion, and recruitment/incentive programs that identify and develop employees with high potential for future leadership or higher level positions in the TSA. If done appropriately, this sort of program would also help ensure a minimum quality level for those employees who move into supervisory or managerial positions.