Paper Reports Heavy Baggage Takes its Toll

A Judy Nichols story in Monday's Arizona Republic reveals that working for the TSA, especially down in the bowels of the airports, may not be all glamor, after all.

Nichols says that the TSA's screeners are often injured, often out of sight, as they lift and place heavy baggage, positioning it to go through the screening machines, at those airports that haven't yet installed dogs [for the screening, not the lifting].

The TSA is saying that most of the injuries are, predictably, knee and back injuries; mostly, they're due, the TSA told the reporter, to the lousy, rushed design of the screening stations that surround the expensive equipment, and lack of time to think about the people that would have to use those stations, eight hours a day.

First Mission: Look Good

Admitting to the reporter that they didn't have time to do the job right in the first place, the TSA apparently planned all along to sacrifice workers' health, in the interest of meeting deadlines. Brian Turmail, identified as a TSA spokesman in DC, said, "We had to do a tremendous amount of work to design baggage screening systems in a tight deadline. It would have been nice to spend the time developing perfect systems, but the bad guys wouldn't wait." The workers, apparently, are expendable. Oh -- and no bad guys have yet been caught, either.

Nichols said the injury rate among the TSA's workers at Sky Harbor in Phoenix is, "just more than 1 percent." She notes that, "...70 percent of the workers are deployed in the security checkpoints at concourses. Those assignments don't require heavy lifting, so the injury rate is higher for those who work on checked bags."

Oh -- and that 1% has occurred since the TSA's takeover. Annualized, that's closer to 15%. Realizing that better than 2/3 of the TSA's workers aren't in the accident-prone zone, we could be looking at 45%, or even higher, on an annualized basis, for those workers who are at highest risk.

Are the problems serious? We can't tell, but Nichols reports that over 80% of the incidents "required medical aid."

The TSA is looking into providing some workers with knee pads; others have received gloves, and/or those wide black belts. ANN's call to the TSA's press office, asking for nationwide numbers, and the breakdown of the most-exposed and -injured workers' sex [the TSA made a point of hiring as many women as possible; we wanted to know if the women are injured, or are subjected to these kinds of stresses, disproportionately --ed], was left unanswered. [Monday was a federal holiday, for the TSA's office workers and bosses -- we'll be sure to let you know, if they update us --ed].

FMI: www.tsa.gov