"Airport Security Screeners Overworked, Report Says"

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Airport Security Screeners Overworked, Report Says
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
The Washington (DC) Post


The nation's 45,000 federal airport-security screeners suffer from low
morale, understaffing and excessive overtime, according to a new report by
the Department of Homeland Security inspector general. 

The report, released yesterday, comes as the agency said it faces a 22
percent attrition rate, compared with 15 percent last year. Before the
federal government took over the screener workforce, private companies that
ran security checkpoints typically incurred staff turnover of 100 percent a
year. 
 
The report focused on working conditions among screeners employed by private
companies under an experimental program at five airports. 

Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin said his report did not find many
differences between the federal workers and those employed by private
companies. In an earlier report, he said the performance of both groups of
workers was "equally poor" in detecting weapons hidden by inspectors at the
security checkpoints. The same was true of the workers' level of training,
supervision and job satisfaction Ervin said yesterday. "There really was no
difference." 

Ervin's report details a Transportation Security Administration bureaucracy
that seemed unresponsive to local airport directorswho pleaded at times to
hire and train more security screeners. The agency sent out software to
train screeners how to detect weapons inside luggage. Screeners learned to
recognize fake weapons in baggage, but the software was not updated to test
them with new images. 

"As a result, screeners eventually memorized the threat images, rendering
the training software ineffective," the report says. The report was released
a month before airport directors will be allowed to choose to return to a
private screener workforce. 

TSA spokesman Mark O. Hatfield Jr.,said the agency has since changed the way
that it manages the screeners, and airports now have the ability to hire and
train local people instead of awaiting direction from headquarters. The
management difficulties described in the report were "part of the nature of
how the agency was organized at that time," Hatfield said. 

Hatfield attributed the higher attrition rates in part to the overtime that
screeners were asked to work this summer as passengers returned to flying in
numbers not seen since before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "It
makes sense because we've had a long, tough summer," Hatfield said.

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