Another Dem Wet Kiss to Big Labor

Are the Dems serious about airport security? Probably not, based on their decision to push for unionized airport screeners:

Meanwhile, Democrats also keep trying to impose collective bargaining rights for all 43,000 screeners at the Transportation Security Administration. Congress expressly denied such organizing ability when it created TSA in 2001, on the sensible grounds that union work rules would compromise security.

Screeners need to adapt to changing threats, often with random and unpredictable methods. Union rules would require negotiating over these methods with labor chiefs at each work site, meaning at every airport. By TSA's estimate, union rules would also require pulling some 8% of the work force offline to meet new management demands. This would require either closing screening lanes or adding thousands of new screeners at more cost to taxpayers.

Democrats in both the House and Senate have nonetheless tucked TSA unionization provisions into their "9/11 Commission recommendation" bills. The White House has objected, however, and 36 Republican Senators have already promised to sustain a veto. So Democrats are now falling back to Plan B, which is a "compromise" offered last week by new Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. Under her approach, airport screeners would still be forced into collective bargaining, though the TSA head would have the right to put union rules aside in case of "emergency" or "imminent threat."

Those concepts could certainly use some fleshing out, since we thought terrorism after 9/11 was threat enough. Mr. DeMint asked on the Senate floor last week if Ms. McCaskill considered the global war on terror to be such an "emergency," and she said no--but that a hurricane might qualify. We didn't know TSA screened for bad weather.

The Dems keep trying to jam unions down the throats of American workers, even those that don't want them (see this previous post on the attempt to take away the right of secret ballots for union elections). Turning our airport screeners into a fancier version of postal workers is not the way you protect our airlines from security threats, and the Dems amazing lack of recognition of this fact simply proves that paybacks for election dollars are more important than common sense.