See: 13th Amendment
The airport pat-down patrol has been calling in sick.
Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown, have called out from work this week from at least four major airports, according to two senior agency officials and three TSA employee union officials.
Did you miss it? I’ll repeat.
Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown
Who are required to work for no pay. That’s what we call “slavery,” and it’s not allowed.
“This problem of call outs is really going to explode over the next week or two when employees miss their first paycheck,” a union official at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport told CNN. “TSA officers are telling the union they will find another way to make money. That means calling out to work other jobs.”
You know, this isn’t a job that rich people do. Let’s look up what the pay is.
Airport security jobs typically begin at the D pay band, which is $25,518 to $38,277. The promotion potential is the E pay band, which is $29,302 to $44,007. In addition to the base salary for TSA airport jobs, individuals may receive a locality pay, depending on where the job is located.
Not that much. If you have a couple of kids (or more), maybe parents you have to help, have to drive to get there, have high rent or a big mortgage…the pay is not that much. They likely live paycheck to paycheck. They can’t work without pay – yet apparently our government “requires” them to. Illegally.
Two of the sources, who are federal officials, described the sick outs as protests of the paycheck delay. One called it the “blue flu,” a reference to the blue shirts worn by transportation security officers who screen passengers and baggage at airport security checkpoints.
A union official, however, said that while some employees are upset about the pay, officers have said they are calling in sick for more practical reasons. Single parents can no longer afford child care or they are finding cash-paying jobs outside of government work to pay their rent and other bills, for example.
Ya think?
The important thing is that Trump has prioritized border safety as the reason for his principled stand.
I remember the furloughs of the Reagan administration. I wasn’t hurting, and my husband was working, but even missing a single day of pay was devastating for many of us. Having to work without even having that? No. We would have quickly grown desperate. Many of us were scrimping already – just one day a month.
‘Blue flu’ describes police strikes. Its an old term, used since 1967 when police who could not legally strike organised to use their sick leave to stop work.