chollie

I can't find the link now. I was reading about the retention problem - it's been going on for years and there's no sign it's getting bettter. In fact, with the economy improving, it seems to be getting worse.

A couple factors cited: TSA started making more and more employees part-time. At my company, there's a certain amount of overhead just for hiring and having an employee on the payroll. It is much cheaper for the company to have one full-time employee than 2 part-time employees. Many of these part-time employees were given crazy shifts that very few people are willing to work for any length of time: split shifts, mid-day half-shifts, etc. Perhaps TSA thought shifting people to part-time would result in a savings; I think the opposite has happened.

They also deliberately implemented things like BDOs and greatly expanded the ratio of non-working LTSOs/STSOs to working TSO's specifically to create a higher pay level in an attempt to retain employees. Unfortunately, that meant that good people and management pets got promoted to jobs where they no longer actually checked bags or worked checkpoints, thus putting even more pressure on TSOs to pick up the slack.

If you needed 10 TSOs to work a checkpoint and you promoted 5 of them to STSO, LTSO and BDO, you only have 5 people left who are actually processing pax and bags at the checkpoint.

In my organization, in crisis/overload times, even third level managers roll up their sleeves and get in the trenches with the peons to get the work out. TSA doesn't operate that way. We would see significant improvements immediately if all LTSOs, STSOs and BDOs were immediately told to keep their fat paychecks but go back to actually performing a function at the checkpoint or baggage search.

Of course, now we're in this bizarre situation where Neffy's trying to convince Congress that all we have to do is make the lines even worse until another 15 million people sign up for Pre. Meanwhile, potential purchasers see closed Pre lanes, or Pre reduced to nothing more than being allowed to keep one's shoes on in the regular lane.