Author: Patrick McGeehan / Source: New York Times
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The partial shutdown of the federal government is starting to affect air travel as a growing number of security agents are refusing to work for no pay.
So far, the impact on passengers has been relatively limited. But airport workers and travelers are concerned that conditions will worsen if the impasse continues, throwing travel into turmoil.
At least one airport, Miami International Airport, will start closing one terminal early each day, starting on Saturday, because of a shortage of screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration, said Greg Chin, an airport spokesman.
Mr. Chin said agents had been calling in sick at double the normal rate this week, leaving their supervisors worried that they will not have enough agents to operate all of the airport’s 11 security checkpoints.
T.S.A. officials were conferring Friday with airline executives and airport managers to decide whether they might need to consolidate screening operations at any other airports to cope with heavier passenger traffic over the weekend, said Michael Bilello, a T.S.A. spokesman.
The nation’s 51,000 airport security agents are among the federal employees who have been ordered to work through the partial shutdown, which began on Dec. 22.
On Friday, they missed their first paycheck since it started, a lapse that their union leaders feared would cause more of them to stop showing up for work or even to quit their jobs.
Hydrick Thomas, president of the T.S.A. Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, said this week that “extreme financial hardship” had driven some of his members to resign and many others to consider doing so.
The agents earn about $35,000 a year, on average, union officials said. “We have people that work from paycheck to paycheck and there’s quite a few of them,” said Vincent R. Castellano, national vice president for the union’s second district, which encompasses the Northeast.
Near Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, a church-sponsored food pantry has been delivering food to T.S.A. workers, said Jessica Whichard, a spokeswoman for the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina. Ms. Whichard said the White Oak Foundation had requested more food than usual from the food bank so that it could distribute some of it to the airport workers.
The workers, many of them still in their T.S.A. uniforms after finishing their shifts, showed up to collect food at a makeshift pantry the foundation set up in a parking lot near the airport, said Kathleen Lee, director of services for the foundation. She said the foundation would continue offering food to federal employees twice a week at the White Oak Missionary Baptist Church in Cary, N.C., for “as long as necessary.”
Ms. Lee said the workers were not sheepish about accepting the handouts. She said that one of them told her, “If I’m getting free groceries then I can pay my light bill.”
[The shutdown is being felt by Americans in widely varying ways. For some, it is invisible; for others, it’s inescapable.]
Despite the shutdown and the hardships it is causing…
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