"Airport security plan thins minority ranks"

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Airport security plan thins minority ranks
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jennifer Oldham
The Los Angeles (CA) Times


WASHINGTON - The federal takeover of aviation security is shifting the
demographics of airports around the United States, as white workers
increasingly replace minorities in thousands of screener jobs.

Statistics from the Transportation Security Administration indicate that
Latinos and Asian Americans are finding it particularly difficult to land
the higher-paying federal screener posts. As of mid-September, most of the
21,983 new hires were white.

At issue are a citizenship requirement for federal screeners and a
pre-employment test that many current workers allege is discriminatory.

The TSA ''is not as diverse as my expectation was,'' said Representative Ed
Pastor, an Arizona Democrat and member of the House panel that oversees
aviation security funding. ''They need to look at their hiring practices and
say, `We're coming up short.'''

The agency, however, says it is pleased with its efforts to hire minorities.
''We're right on target, and in some cases better,'' spokeswoman Heather
Rosenker said. She defended the pre-employment test as an objective
assessment developed by personnel specialists.

Federal screeners are gradually replacing private employees in a transition
that is supposed to be done within months. In August, TSA began filling
security slots at Logan International Airport in Boston; 1,200 private
workers will be replaced by next year. About half of those workers are
non-US citizens and will lose their jobs unless they become citizens.

Nationally, whites account for 61 percent of the federal screeners, while 21
percent are black, 10 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian, and 1 percent
American Indian, according to TSA statistics. Earlier this month at Lambert
International Airport in St. Louis, black screeners closed checkpoints for
10 minutes to draw attention to complaints they were being left out of the
new federal jobs.

The TSA has also encountered problems hiring female screeners. It initially
set a goal that half the workers would be women, in order to address
reported abuses by male screeners searching female passengers. Yet only 31
percent of the new hires are women.

There are no figures on the ethnicity of screeners before the Sept. 11
attacks, but a former Federal Aviation Administration security chief said
the work force was overwhelmingly made up of minorities. ''I remember one of
the senior managers in the FAA saying, `I'll know those are good jobs when I
see white guys working in them.' He himself was black,'' said Cathal Flynn,
who headed the security branch from 1993 to 2000.

The new TSA jobs pay $23,600 to $35,400 a year, plus benefits. The private
security screener jobs often paid minimum wage.

''This is not the same job,'' said Elizabeth Kolmstetter, a TSA official who
oversees training standards. ''We need a work force that can keep up with
change.''

Many of the job requirements were set by Congress and cannot be changed,
spokeswoman Rosenker said.

For many Latinos and Asians, a key barrier to TSA employment is the
requirement that the agency recruit only US citizens. Other federal
agencies - including the Defense Department - do not have to apply such
sweeping citizenship rules. About 31,000 noncitizens are on active duty in
the armed forces, enough for a couple of Army divisions. Legally, none of
them could be a federal airport screener. An amendment pending in the
Senate, sponsored by Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, would waive
the citizenship rule for current screeners who are permanent US residents.

Citizenship appears to be only one dimension of the problem.

Union representatives say the TSA exam and its English test are
discriminatory against nonnative speakers.


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