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One Year On By Brendan Martin "Protecting civil aviation from a terrorist attack is an urgent national issue", an American civil servant told Congress on 11 September, 1996. Five years to the day later, even George W. Bush could grasp the meaning of what Keith O. Fultz, assistant comptroller-general of the US Congress General Accounting Office (GAO), had told the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The decisive leadership shown by the Bush administration in its military response to the four murderous hijackings has been widely praised in Britain. But the significance of another radical change of direction following that atrocity seems to have attracted less attention. Seldom can there have been so dramatic an acknowledgement that some public services require regulation through direct government ownership and management - and that "flexible" labour markets can undermine service efficiency and quality - as that demonstrated by President Bush on 19 November last year. In a bill signing ceremony at Reagan National Airport, Bush established a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to bring under federal control, and into public employment, the privatised passenger and baggage screening operations found so tragically wanting two months earlier. The TSA's passenger screeners, decently paid and properly trained, would be in place at all 429 of the USA's commercial airports within a year, the president decreed. Electronically equipped baggage screeners would join them by the end of 2002. "For the first time, airport security will become a direct federal responsibility", Bush proudly declared. It was left to the Washington Post to point out "the irony of a president committed to small government celebrating the birth of a new federal bureaucracy". But it was a conception, not a birth, the pregnancy has proved troublesome and the father is already withholding the maintenance. The planned budget for the new service has been cut, although - or, perhaps, because - the anticipated workforce has grown from 30,000 to 65,000. Its first director has already resigned. And the airlines whose contracted-out security arrangements were breached last year are demanding that the deadline for having the new service fully in place is put back. In addition, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), having launched a vigorous recruitment campaign among the 16,000 federal screeners already hired, has been told there will be no collective bargaining. Federal employees are forbidden by law to strike, but the union says they should at least have the right to "whistle blow". That too has been turned down. It is not only ideology that drives the Bush White House to undermine the one non- military public service it has created even before it is up and running. Like Enron and other energy companies, the USA's aviation industry has not stinted in campaign contributions to both parties. Unforseeable? Deregulation of US aviation in 1978 is now seen as the key landmark at the start of the long road through market liberalisation and privatisation of other sectors internationally over the quarter century since then. On the face of it, deregulation has worked wonders. Air travel has more or less doubled in volume, deregulation has spread around the globe and competition has produced increasing pressures to keep costs down. In a 1997 report on regulatory reform, the OECD noted that "in the United States, real fares dropped by one third between 1976 and 1993; more than half of this decline is attributed to deregulation." But the financial costs alone of 11 September - a tragedy made possible by breaches of casualised airport security that had been waiting to happen for more than 20 years - will probably exceed those savings. Just the insurance bill is estimated to be as high as US$70 billion, which makes the money saved by airlines that would neither pay nor train airport security workers properly look like a very good bargain missed. Quite possibly, nothing could have prevented the tragedy of 11 September 2001. The issue here, however, is that the cheap labour privatized airport security that followed the competitive cost cutting stimulated by deregulation proved incapable of delivering services of a standard acknowledged by all stakeholders as being necessary. When Keith Fultz gave his eerily prescient evidence to Congress on 11 September, 1996, it was by no means the first time that he or his colleagues had made such a warning, and nor would it be the last. On that day, Congressional records show, Fultz went on to note that the GAO had "previously reported about the challenges of protecting the US civil aviation system from terrorists' attacks, the potential extent of terrorists' motivation and capabilities, and the attractiveness of aviation as a target for terrorists." He went on to refer to a similar warning issued by his agency in 1994 and a further two earlier in 1996. Unwittingly, Fultz even named the eventual target of the attack he was doing his best to prevent, commenting: "Events such as the [then recent] World Trade Center bombing have revealed that the terrorists' threat in the United States is more serious and extensive than previously believed." Clearly, whatever were the causes of the failure to protect US internal flights from the fate met by four of them on that devastating morning last year, lack of foresight as to the nature of the threat was not among them. The record of Fultz's testimony shows that just about every detail had been foreseen but not averted. The dangers of deregulation Nor could those warnings be dismissed as civil servants covering their backs or trying to build their empires. Others had also repeatedly alerted the aviation industry and politicians to the public hazards arising from what had at first seemed to be a set of reforms - opening up America's skies to liberalised competition - from which the consumer could only benefit. For example, in 1988, following the explosion of one of its aeroplanes over Lockerbie in Scotland with the loss of 269 lives, Pan Am commissioned a study by a private security consultant, Isaac Yeffet, who had previously been employed by the Israeli carrier, El Al. Having surveyed 25 Pan Am offices around the world, Yeffet concluded, in a 200-page report, that the airline had changed little as a result of its experience and remained "highly vulnerable to terrorist attack". The report classified the issues which needed to be addressed into seven categories, one of which Yeffet summarised as: "The airlines put their trust in gadgets - metal detectors and X-ray machines - spending millions on equipment and little on the people who operate it." (1) In fact, as Congressional documents show, the necessary spending was not even made on equipment, and even when it was purchased, it was not necessarily deployed. So the problem was possibly worse than Yeffet realised when he commented in his report: "There is no airline security in the United States. What little is being done to protect passengers is not done well. Security pays for itself in decreased insurance fees and increased ridership, but airline executives have made security a low priority. There is no reason to believe this will change until there is a major disaster at a US airport." (2) Another study of air piracy and its causes carried out in 1991 by Canadian academic Peter St. John, after he had lost an assistant at Lockerbie, pointed out: "Humans alone make judgement calls. Yet Americans place the decision as to whether or not a plane is secure in the hands of a poorly trained, underpaid, unmotivated, and overworked contract employee." (3) The book goes on: "The central problem in both US and Canadian airports is that the security personnel are completely inadequate for the job. In both countries the government has left the task of maintaining security to the air carriers. The air carriers are in the business of transportation to make money, so it stands to reason that they will hire the security firms who mount the lowest bid for the task of maintaining airport security. The personnel that result from this process are poorly trained, are scarcely motivated, are paid subsistence wages, and are given little incentive to feel good about themselves or their jobs." By 11 September last year, the market leader among those security companies, with around 40 per cent of the total US airport business, was Argenbright, a subsidiary of the British firm, Securicor. In May, 2000, Argenbright was found guilty of failing to do background checks before hiring screening staff, failing to train them to regulated standards and making false submissions about these matters to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulatory body then responsible for airport security. However, the company did not lose its contracts. Instead, it was placed on "probation" for three years. This was extended to five years in October 2001, despite the previous month's outrage and even though the US District Court for Pennsylvania that sanctioned the extension had heard from federal officials that the company had not changed its practices. Indeed, during 2001, even while under "probation", Argenbright was fined $1m for violations that included employing convicted felons. Yet, following the enactment of the White House-backed legislation to bring airport security into public ownership, the company announced it was considering legal action for compensation. "We are seeking legal advice," the BBC reported a company spokesperson as saying. "This was completely unforeseeable." Undertrained, underpaid, undervalued In fact, its failures and the need to do something about them had been not only foreseeable but also foreseen. Yeffet's report, St. John's book and, above all, a series of reports by the government's own civil servants had concurred that the central weakness of the US airport security system was its failure to invest properly in privatised workforces. In his book, St. John drew upon the Yeffet report and noted that some airport security workers were receiving little over two hours training, and that staff turnover was so high that new recruits who stuck it out long enough could find themselves promoted to supervisor within two months. When long queues of increasingly irate passengers built up at X-ray machines - as they would, because too few security staff were employed to cater for busy periods effectively - the workers would be told to speed up the process, and thus weaken their standards of inspection still further. By April 2000, Congress was being told by the Associate Director of its General Accounting Office, Keith Fultz's boss Gerald Dillingham, that concerns had been "raised for many years by us and by others about the effectiveness of the screeners and the need to improve their performance." In that particular example of futile GAO testimony, Dillingham mentioned alarming test results dating back to 1978 - the year US airlines were deregulated. Stressing the importance of investment in the workers entrusted with the task, Dillingham told Congress: "There is no single reason why screeners fail to identify dangerous objects. Two conditions - rapid screener turnover and inadequate attention to human factors - are believed to be important causes. "The rapid turnover among screeners has been a long-standing problem, having been singled out as a concern in FAA and GAO reports dating back to at least 1979. We reported in 1987 that turnover among screeners was about 100 percent a year at some airports, and today, the turnover is considerably higher." In fact, in the year before Dillingham's testimony, turnover had averaged 126 per cent among screeners at 19 large airports, including those from which the hijacked aircraft used in the September 11 outrage would take off. In one case, it was as high as 416 per cent, meaning that the screeners were remaining in their jobs for an average of less than three months each. "Both FAA and the aviation industry attribute the rapid turnover to the low wages the screeners receive, the minimal benefits, and the daily stress of the job", Dillingham's testimony stated. "Generally, screeners get paid at or near the minimum wage. We found that some of the screening companies at many of the nation's largest airports paid screeners a starting salary of $6 an hour. It is common for the starting wages at airport fast-food restaurants to be higher than the wages the screeners receive." It took 9/11 to convince the US political establishment that it was time to listen to such advice. Previously, money seems to have talked more convincingly to them. Airline and related contributions to congressional and presidential candidates totalled more than $6.7 million in 2000, according to the Center for Responsible Politics in Washington, an increase of more than $2.5 million from 1996. The 2000 figure included more than $1.6 million to the 48 members of the House aviation subcommittee, to which Fultz and Dillingham issued their warnings, and $870,000 to the 20-member Senate aviation subcommittee. Ask the professionals Less heed had been paid to another important stakeholder - the people employed in the industry and their union representatives. They had been pressing the arguments about deregulation and safety for some time. In June 2001, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest affiliate to the AFL-CIO (the US equivalent of the TUC), had launched a campaign to improve the pay and benefits, training and working conditions of passenger screeners at airports. The SEIU proposed a five-point plan of action to deal with the long-standing problems linking the poor employment conditions of those workers with the security of air passengers. Those five points were: * that airport security should be a publicly accountable federal government responsibility; * that enough screeners should be employed to deliver the service effectively; * that pay and benefits should be increased to tackle the problem of high staff turnover; * that screeners should be provided with the equipment required to be effective; * and that there should be a "strong, independent voice to speak out for safety". Following Bush's statement at Reagan National Airport last November, the TSA came into being in February this year and its new employees were deployed for the first time at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in May. At the time of writing, they have taken over at 37 airports. The new service is certainly an improvement on its privatised predecessor. Its workforce receives training five times longer than the private contractors provided, and enjoys much better pay and conditions, including health and life insurance, retirement benefits, paid vacation and sick leave. However, the government still refuses to concede the AFGE demand that airport workers - entitled by law to join a union - be given collective bargaining rights and protected for "whistle blowing" about security lapses. The union's president, Bobby Harnage, insists: "AFGE has long known what happens when you give jobs with important public responsibilities to the lowest bidder - you get employers who pay the worst and treat their employees the worst. The workers suffer, the quality of the workforce suffers, and in this case our public safety was threatened. "AFGE was among the organizations that lobbied hardest for the federalization of airport security personnel and we have now begun an aggressive organizing campaign among airport security screeners - advocating for a workforce in which workers are considered professionals and treated as such. In addition, airport screeners should be federal employees in more than just name. They should be allowed to organize to ensure fairness and equity on the job to provide the best protection for the American public." There are signs that senior civil servants, like Fultz and Dillingham before them, understand well the relationship between quality employment and quality service. On July 26, in a letter to AFGE president Harnage, the TSA's new chief, James Loy (appointed following the resignation of the Bush administration's original choice, John Magaw), wrote: "The war against terrorism has a domestic front and we are the soldiers figuring out how to win." The TSA would work in partnership with all stakeholders to fulfil its mission, Loy added. The test will be how Loy and his political masters respond to the challenge now laid down by Harnage, who insists: "The TSA should act quickly to recognise that screeners' rights to bargain collectively will aid in its mission to protect the flying public. As Americans, full rights for workers is the least we should do." The Bush White House has a rival vision of what the stars and stripes represent. If it concedes AFGE's demands, it will be a stronger sign than the establishment of the TSA that we are at the beginning of the end of an era of public service reform ushered in by airline deregulation nearly a quarter of a century ago. But can we expect that from a government more willing to go to war than to negotiate with its own employees? Notes 1. St. John, Peter, (1991) Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism: Winning the War against the Hijackers, Quorum Books, p. 85. 2. Yeffet, Isaac, "The Next Bomb", Life magazine, March 1989, p. 132, quoted in St. John, Op cit, p. 177. 3. St. John, Op cit, p. 85. © Brendan Martin, 2002 Earlier versions of this article appeared as a chapter of Democracy, Social Dialogue and Regulatory Reform: Learning from privatisation policy failures, a paper for the global union federation Public Services International (PSI), and in the PSI magazine, Focus. The PSI's sponsorship of the research is gratefully acknowledged. Brendan Martin is the author of In the Public Interest? Privatisation and Public Sector Reform, Zed Books/PSI, 1993, and In the Public Service, Zed Books (forthcoming). He is Director of the London-based think tank and consultancy, Public World. Contact: bmartin@publicworld.org |
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