[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5113-5114]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  TSA

  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I wanted to make a few remarks relative to 
the TSA legislation the Senate is considering. I do hope we can get it 
finished. I am a little confused about what we are trying to achieve 
with the measure that is before us. We have already been through this. 
We have passed a great many of the recommendations that were made by 
the 9/11 Commission--actually, most of them, as a matter of fact. It is 
of concern to me that we have a 300-page bill here on what is left in 
the Commission's report.
  We are going through a number of the bills that relate to portions of 
the report that really have nothing to do with enhancing homeland 
security. For example, the 9/11 Commission didn't have anything to do 
with collective bargaining rights for labor unions. Here we probably 
had a good reason not to do that. In fact, we had this extended debate 
back in 2002. We found that it was not in the interest of national 
security to provide collective bargaining rights in this instance. Here 
we are dealing with it again.
  I guess I am just a little impatient in that we need to move on. I 
don't think homeland security ought to have the approval of labor 
unions to move forward. The policy would also greatly hinder TSA's 
flexibility to respond to terrorist threats, fresh intelligence, and 
other emergencies, if we did it that way. We need to have the ability 
to move screeners around as schedules are necessary and threats change. 
Obviously, in a security bill of this kind, there needs to be the kind 
of flexibility, the kind of management that can be there for the 
agencies that are responsible. The real focus is on the capability to 
deal with homeland security.
  Another concern I have, frankly, is a provision relative to the 
distribution of funding. I understand that urban areas, large areas--
New York and so on--have more concerns about security and threats, 
perhaps, but rural areas do as well. We have energy production and 
those kinds of things. Wyoming originally had $20 million involved. It 
has dropped to $9 million. We do have military bases there. Large sums 
of money have been unused, and we need to evaluate that distribution 
somewhat.
  As we debate the bill, I look forward to supporting amendments that 
would actually make America safer and that we don't get into areas that 
really are not directly associated with security. That is what this 
legislation is about.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we are debating S. 4, dealing with the 
TSA employees, the Transportation Security Agency. The most 
controversial aspect of that has to do with the unionization of those 
employees. We have had this debate before. We had it when the 
Department of Homeland Security was created. It was a very vigorous 
debate. Quite frankly, it held up the bill for a considerable period of 
time.
  Ultimately, the Senate and the House decided, with the concurrence of 
the President, that it would not be a good idea to have these workers 
unionized. But they are Federal workers and they should have the same 
rights as every other Federal worker was the argument in favor of 
unionization. The argument against has to do with the peculiar nature 
of their assignment. They are not Federal workers in the same sense 
that people working in the Federal Highway Administration, building 
highways, might be Federal workers. They are not Federal workers in the 
same sense that people dealing with normal routines are Federal 
workers.
  They appear to be, as we see them day to day--as all of us go through 
the security procedures at airports and we take off our shoes and our 
belts and we forget our boarding pass because it is in the bin with the 
computer and they have to help us recover it and so on--we all have the 
sense that these are fairly routine operations they are going through. 
Therefore, why not allow them to form a union and engage in collective 
bargaining, because this is, in fact, fairly routine work--very 
important work, to be sure, but fairly routine. In fact, it is not 
fairly routine, as we have seen during the time this force has been in 
place.
  Let me take my colleagues back to the situation before the TSA was 
created. Screening was done airport by airport, contractor by 
contractor, because it was viewed as a routine kind of thing. Like all 
Senators, I travel in and out of enough airports to know that each 
airport is different. In the days before TSA, one never quite knew what 
they were going to get. You would go through one airport very rapidly, 
you would go to another and they would be sticklers for detail.
  These people were contracted by the airlines, and they had a wide 
range of skills and a wide range of training. One of the reasons we 
decided after 9/11 we would have a single Federal force to deal with 
this was we wanted a single level of training, accountability, and 
competence to cover the entire American system anywhere in the country.
  I have found that is now basically true. If I go through the airport 
in Philadelphia, I get treated pretty much the same way as if I go 
through the airport in Salt Lake City. This, however, has a security 
component that is over and above the screening component.
  We are in a war with an enemy unlike any we have ever had before, and 
the primary tool in protecting us in this war is intelligence. This is 
an intelligence war rather than a war between tanks and aircraft 
carriers and infantry battalions. So when the intelligence turns up a 
key piece of information in this war, the TSA must be flexible and 
responsive to its leadership.
  If we had a series of organized unions, one different in each of the 
450 airports that operate in the United States, we would not have the 
flexibility nor the capacity to respond that we currently have in this 
situation.
  Let me give you a few case studies to illustrate what I mean.
  The most dramatic, of course, was that which occurred when the 
British intelligence operations discovered there was a plot to blow 
airplanes up over the Atlantic through the device of taking innocent-
looking liquids onboard the airplane and then combining them to create 
an explosive bomb on the airplane.
  I remember a study being done at the University of Utah after this 
was over, by some of the professors there who looked at it and said: It 
is possible, it can be done, and it can be done fairly simply. They 
outlined how it would be done--something that, frankly, had not 
occurred to anybody as they were setting up TSA in the first place.
  The terrorists in Great Britain were inventive enough to come up with 
the idea. As we contemplate the possibility of it being carried out, it 
is truly diabolical. They would have gotten on the airplane, passing 
all screening, gotten together back in the coach cabin--they would not 
have had to storm the cockpit or try to take over the airplane the way 
the terrorists on 9/11 did--mixed their chemicals together and had the 
airplane blow up over the Atlantic.
  That means there would be no black box to recover. The entire 
wreckage of the airplane would be at the bottom of the Atlantic, far 
beyond any discovery, and the airplane would simply have disappeared 
off the radar scope, with no explanation, no commentary in the cockpit. 
The pilot would be reporting, if anybody was listening, that everything 
was fine, everything was normal and, suddenly, the airplane would have 
disappeared.
  The terrorists were scheduled to blowup not one plane, but three or 
four. Can we imagine what kind of uncertainty that would have created 
in the air traffic system worldwide if that

[[Page 5114]]

plot had succeeded? Fortunately, the British intelligence agencies 
discovered it, interrupted it, and prevented it. In the process, 
naturally, they notified the American intelligence agencies. What did 
those agencies do? They went to TSA. They went to the TSA leadership 
and explained what had happened. The TSA leadership had a security 
clearance to get all the information about the intelligence involved, 
and TSA swung into action immediately.
  Let me give you some of the details. At 4 o'clock in the morning, 
transportation security officers arriving at the east coast airports, 
where the first flights would take off, were informed there were new 
procedures. They were instructed in the procedures. They were trained 
very quickly. Immediately, seamlessly, through the entire TSA system, 
everyone was brought up to speed.
  The difference between what happened in Great Britain and what 
happened in America is fairly dramatic. Let me read a commentary that 
describes that: ``Passengers in the United States and the United 
Kingdom saw two completely different effects of the changes. In the UK, 
dozens of flights were canceled, scores delayed, and a nightmare of 
travel backups ensued and lasted for days. By contrast, no 
cancellations occurred in the United States as a result of this 
change.'' None.
  That is because TSA was nimble; TSA could act quickly. There was no 
concern about revealing the intelligence source of this information to 
the leaders of TSA because they were all Government employees, and they 
were all responsive to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
  If collective bargaining had been in place and a requirement for 
union approval of change of routines, a clearance by shop stewards of 
change of patterns, to make sure it fit in with the collective 
bargaining requirement--a different series of requirements at different 
airports, as the union would organize Philadelphia but not Baltimore, 
as the union would organize Kennedy but not LaGuardia, as the union 
would organize Miami but not New Orleans or wherever you might want to 
go--the patchwork that would occur, if passage of S. 4 goes forward in 
its present form, would create all kinds of chaos in the United States.
  Fear of disclosing the British information might have caused U.S. 
officials to say: Let's think twice before we describe what is going on 
and why we are doing what we are doing because it might reveal sources 
and methods to people who are not cleared for that and inadvertently 
they could leak it back to al-Qaida. None of those fears occurred. None 
of those problems arose because TSA was structured from the very 
beginning to be the kind of agency it is.
  Another example of what could happen if we allow S. 4 to go forward 
in its present form occurred in Canada. Quoting from a description of 
that:

       Consider a recent incident in Canada, a nation whose air 
     security system does not have the flexibility like that 
     granted to the TSA. Last Thanksgiving, as part of a labor 
     dispute, ``passenger luggage was not properly screened--and 
     sometimes not screened at all'' as airport screeners engaged 
     in a work-to-rule campaign, creating long lines at Toronto's 
     Pearson International Airport.

  OK, that is the kind of thing we expect. Unions organize for the 
ability to do slowdowns or strikes or whatever as pressure on 
management to get what they want. That is what happened.
  What was the consequence with respect to security?

       A government report found that to clear the lines, about 
     250,000 passengers were rushed through with minimal or no 
     screening whatsoever. One Canadian security expert was quoted 
     as saying that ``if terrorists had known that in those three 
     days that their baggage wasn't going to be searched, that 
     would have been bad.''

  I think it would have been more than bad. If the terrorists had had 
any advance indication there would be that kind of breakdown in the 
screening activities in Canada as a result of union activity, they 
would have said: All right, that is the time we go to the airport, we 
go to the airport in some numbers, we carry liquids with us in our 
baggage, and we put explosives in our checked baggage because it is all 
going to go through without proper screening. The pressures from the 
Thanksgiving Day travelers are going to be so high that people are 
going to say: Well, just let it go through this once.
  For the terrorists to strike a significant blow at the United States, 
all we need to do is ``let it go through just this once'' and have them 
have advance notice of when it would go through.
  You cannot organize a strike, you cannot organize a work action 
without people knowing about it. I am not suggesting, in any sense, 
that anyone in TSA--unionized or not--would ever be complicit in 
notifying al-Qaida of the fact that a work action was coming. But al-
Qaida, in a unionized situation, would say: Here is something we want 
to monitor. Here is something we want to pay attention to. Some 
innocent, inadvertent remark on the part of a unionized member of TSA 
could easily get back to al-Qaida, and they would say: We are ready for 
this. Let's go. Here is the opportunity. It is going to come up at 
Thanksgiving. It is going to come up at New Years. It is going to come 
up at the Super Bowl or some other situation.
  Unions look for those kinds of situations where they can get maximum 
leverage for their work actions. It is not hard to figure out where 
that kind of thing might occur. So if a union is dissatisfied with 
working conditions at an airport that services the Super Bowl city on 
Super Bowl Sunday and says: We are going to have a slowdown here unless 
we get this, that or the other, and the slowdown occurs, it would not 
take a genius on al-Qaida's part to say: That is where we probe. That 
is where we do our best to get into the system.
  Once again, if the plot in Britain had borne fruit and three 
airplanes had disappeared off the radar screen, with no advance warning 
and no way to find out what actually happened, worldwide travel would 
have been disrupted everywhere. The economy not only of our country but 
many others would have been seriously devastated. The consequences, 
tragic as they would have been for the families of those on those three 
airplanes, would have multiplied across the world.
  I do not want to take that chance. I intend to support the 
administration's position, which says: If this provision relating to 
unionization of TSA employees does not come out of the bill, we will 
oppose the bill. The President has indicated he might very well veto 
the bill if this provision does not come out. I hope we do not have to 
go that far. I will oppose this provision. I will oppose the bill if 
the provision stays in. If it does go that far and gets to the 
President's desk, I will vote to uphold the President's veto.
  I think the war on terror has taught us we are dealing with an 
entirely different kind of enemy, one who is very patient, one who is 
very intelligent, and one who is very inventive. For us to treat 
security matters such as airport security as a routine kind of task 
that can be dealt with in routine kinds of training and, therefore, is 
eligible for routine kinds of labor relations between management--in 
this case, our leading security agencies--and labor--in this case, 
those who are on the frontline of security for our Nation--would be 
foolish.
  For that reason, again, Mr. President, I would oppose this bill if 
this provision does not come out.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Obama). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I yield myself 8 minutes of the Democratic 
time.

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