You have probably heard that the time to get through a TSA screening at a large airport has ballooned from an hour to several hours. The reason for this is clear - from Michelle Malkin:
MALKIN: TSA’S UNION POWER GRAB: THOUSANDS SLOWING DOWN AIRPORTS
When it comes to public employee unions, there's no such thing as a coincidence.
All you travelers stuck in mile-long TSA security lines are pawns. Convenient political pawns. Big Labor bosses want more power and more money. Stranded travelers are just the latest victims in this age-old game of D.C. extortion.
Union leaders want you to think the fault lies with a stingy Congress unwilling to fork over enough money to fill screener shortages. White House spokesman Josh Earnest poured more partisan fuel on the fire last week by blaming the nationwide slowdowns on "the inability of Republicans in Congress to govern the country."
What a load of flying horse hockey.
The 15-year-old Transportation Security Administration now has a massive annual budget of nearly $7.6 billion and a workforce of nearly 60,000. They had enough tax dollars to waste on an idiotic $1.4 million iPad app that randomly points left or right; $3 million on more than 200 useless explosive detection "puffer" machines that didn't detect explosives reliably; and unknown gobs in awards and automatic bonuses to senior TSA managers at a time when the agency was repeatedly failing internal tests of its ability to stop weapons, bombs and terror threats.
Yet, last week, with airlines, airports and customers all raising holy hell, Congress scraped together $34 million more to pay TSA screeners overtime and fund nearly 800 more screeners to address the summer travel crush.
It's still not enough of course. It's never enough. Since last fall, the TSA workforce (unionized under the Obama administration) has staged protests at major airports (including Dallas-Fort Worth, JFK, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis?St. Paul and Atlanta) organized by the American Federation of Government Employees, which is demanding full collective bargaining rights under federal labor law, along with hefty pay increases.
No reason for them to be unionized - fire them all and privatize it. It will run more efficiently and be significantly cheaper. And start letting them profile for cryin' out loud!
As I have said before, Unions did have their day back when people did not move from city to city and the large factories knew they had a ready base of workers to exploit. Now people move to where the work is and it is a sellers market. The unions have not changed with the times - time for them to toddle off into the sunset like a good dinosaur.
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