WASHINGTON, March 28 (UPI) -- Labor unions are squaring up for a fight over who will represent 40,000 U.S. airport security screeners if a bill granting them collective bargaining rights passes Congress this year.
At stake are millions of dollars in membership dues and a grudge match between two unions who fought a bad-tempered ballot contest for the right to represent other Department of Homeland Security personnel last year.
Tuesday the National Treasury Employees' Union, or NTEU, announced it would charter a local chapter of screeners, federal employees who work for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Union President Colleen Kelly told reporters in a conference call that the local at JFK was just the start, pledging a recruitment drive starting at half a dozen international airports.
But the move will tread on the toes of another union.
The American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, is the only union that currently represents screeners, who check passengers and their baggage at every major U.S. airport.
National Organizer Peter Winch told United Press International that AFGE has 300 members already at JFK and accused rival NTEU of dirty tricks.
"They are not sincere," he said. "They are trying to manipulate the screeners.
"This is just arm wrestling," he said of Kelley's announcement.
Last year the two unions fought a bitterly contested election among staff of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, another agency within Homeland Security, for the right to represent those staff -- many of whom also work at U.S. airports.
Winch said the NTEU effort to recruit screeners was an attempt to pressure the AFGE to abandon an appeal it had filed against the result of that ballot, in which staff chose NTEU to represent them.
In Customs and Border Protection, both unions had members, because AFGE had represented former Immigration and Nationality Service staff from the Justice Department and NTEU had represented former U.S. Customs employees.
But in the case of the screeners, Winch said, the NTEU "is coming into our house."
But he said NTEU was "coming to the game very late ... it is not going to happen for them." He pledged that AFGE would "go head to head with them."
Kelly denied that her union was trying to pressure its rival. "This is not about anyone else," she said, "not about any other union."
Kelly said that the NTEU was responding to demand from screeners at airports. They "can see how we represent their colleagues in (Customs and Border Protection)," she said, adding that screeners "wanted the same level of service, of representation."
"We heard this repeatedly (from screeners) during the (Customs and Border Protection ballot) campaign," she said.
Screeners have the right to join a union, but a provision in the 2001 law that set up the Transportation Security Administration gave the agency's director wide powers to draft new personnel regulations and there is no collective bargaining for employees.
The Sept. 11 reform bill, versions of which have been passed by both the House and Senate, contains language that would give screeners the same rights to collective bargaining as other federal employees.
Administration officials have said they will urge President Bush to veto the law if the final version contains the union language.
If the provision does become law, union membership will remain optional, but many more of the nation's 40,000 odd screeners are likely to sign up.
But labor leaders deny that unions stand to profit.
Winch said that screeners who are members of the AFGE currently pay $7.50 per pay period, or about $195 a year, in membership dues. He said the NTEU would charge its members $10, or $260 a year.
"We have already spent millions of dollars," recruiting and representing screeners, said Winch, including the salaries of several union attorneys working on screener issues.
Both Kelly and Winch said their work with screeners pre-dated the provision giving them collective bargaining.
"For us it's an issue to stop this (Transportation Security Administration) model, this low-wage, no-rights model, from spreading," said Winch, noting that his union represented thousands of other Homeland Security workers. By recruiting screeners, he said, "We are putting our finger in the dyke."
