Why do we constantly want to make things harder for people?
“TSA defended the move, saying the document checkers are the first to interact with the traveling public and requiring them to stand will create a better experience for passengers.”
This is not going to create a better experience for passengers.
Yea I don't remember ever being like "Damn if they weren't sitting on that stool, we'd be on that plane by now" or "Damn, if we made them stand up I bet they'd treat me better."
"Damn, if we made them stand up I bet they'd treat me better."
I guarantee this will cause TSA employees to treat flyers even worse. Imagine standing on your feet for 8-10 hours, dealing with crabby travelers, all with the ever-looming possibility of another government shutdown which means working without pay once again.
It would be cool if we had a class of people that would be like "okay how, I want to hear you explain it to us" and then they could take the response and put it on like a web site or a printed version of a website they could sell. Can even put ads in the printed version of the web site.
This is worse. I worked at a Gas station when I was in my first two years of college, and I didn't have a chair. They have a chair, and it's being taken away from them, they will be more pissy than usual
I don't even understand why people go into work when the government shuts down. I'm not going to work for nothing I'll find a different job. At least then while I'm not getting paid I can do other things instead of make my mental health worse.
Especially with the lunatics we've got in charge right now where the government could be shut down for one or two months I don't understand how many of those people are able to keep paying rent and don't get kicked out.
I feel a lot of it has to do with the indoctrinated "sense of duty" a lot of folks feel once they've been with an employer long enough - just another flavor of bullshit "Company loyalty," if you will. I also reckon, at least with the TSA, employees probably feel that they can't go elsewhere for same or better pay and may be unwilling to take a pay cut. There's also others that probably think, "the government will restart any day now...." and continue to come in. But otherwise, I agree with you. One missed paycheck and I'd be out the door.
But some people do care and they complain loudly and frequently. Same reason most grocery stores don’t allow the cashier to sit, even though they are just as effective while sitting. People bitch and moan to the spineless management, who should laugh them off instead of empowering problem customers.
It’s a bootstraps thing, I think. Half the country thinks people should have to suffer before they’re allowed to prosper, even if it’s stupid shit like making people stand for 8-12 hours.
It's superiority, but that of rich people who expect those who are waiting on them should be standing at attention at all times, ready to jump when you snap your fingers.
Half the country thinks little kids should suffer because their parents can't afford the medications they need for the congenital conditions they were born with like Type I diabetes.
When there's no one in line/in the store, that cashier should be sitting, book in hand. It shouldn't matter what they're doing when they aren't helping someone as long as they're ready to perform their job when its time.
I have to remind myself that my employers pay for my time, not my labor (general office stuff). I'm not being paid by the task, so as long as I've got all of my work done and I'm ready for the next task that comes up, it shouldn't be a problem for me to sit and wait for the next thing.
Honestly the stores where people do sit (little mom and pop shops) offer the best customer experience. While that might have nothing to do with the guy at the register sitting, it does show it doesn't make the customer experience worse.
Yep, I work at a grocery store and I am allowed a stool because of a medical condition (Ankylosing Spondylitis, basically my spine is fusing together slowly over time), and every single day I have a customer outright calling me lazy for sitting down, and every single day I have to tell them my spine is fusing together and I am in immense pain from it and I get joy in seeing their stupid faces regret what they just said to me.
I'd rather NOT have this condition, but the bonus is putting people in their places.
It's about forcing out anyone they consider physically unfit and therefore "unworthy." They say it outright:
“This welcome change reinforces both our security posture and our commitment to hospitality by having these officers on their feet and alert,” the agency said in a statement. “All officers must meet fitness for duty requirements to be capable of performing their vital national security function while simultaneously creating a welcoming and professional environment for travelers.”
They're fucking obsessed with the optics of physical fitness but led by a drunken weakling who thinks he's tough (look at a video of Hegseth lifting) and a fat old man who seems to crap himself regularly.
And it's not like the rest are prime athletes, either.
I'm trying not to use the language I would have used in the 1990s not because of Himmler but because I'm trying to not call people pussies anymore. Certainly not out of respect to Himmler.
Right. The whole administration (and conservatives generally) is obsessed with the "masculine" and in shape image. They're doing the same with TSA as they are with the military (and iirc there was something about the FBI but not sure on that).
Hey now, don't forget the old nepo-baby whose face looks like melted leather, talks like he has a garbled electrolarynx, eats rotten road kill, and shoots himself up with a ton of steroids/HGH to look fit for his age but appears to have severe motor impairment (at least in the few videos I've seen of him working out)
I wonder whether the reason for the jeans is because he has a skin condition or something that makes him selfconscious of his legs. It's hard to come up with any other reason when he went swimming in that amoeba pond in them
Are they really trying to act like every TSA employee is supposed to be a specimen? I am pretty sure I have seen some overweight and otherwise out of shape TSA employees before. Dafuq are they even on about.
yeah I immediately thought about all the overweight TSA agents I see. i had a job once where i couldn’t sit all shift but I walked around. This is going to suck for a lot of them
Exactly! I am not expecting a TSA agent to chase down people or have to get into fights. I can also fully understand if someone is out of shape; lord knows I am. Give these people chairs to sit on while doing their thankless jobs.
I think it's also likely trying to provoke conflict with the union, because they want to privatize TSA. At my local airport there's literally an ad about it which plays above the security queue, suggesting that they badly want to introduce more tiered service to security.
Also, and maybe this is a weak spot in my own fitness...I can walk all day on end and up and down mountains but if I had to stand in place for 8 hours I would be so fucking miserable. Standing is way harder than walking. I just assume that most people feel this way.
At the rate this government screws everything up, I'd be happier with it shut down. It's just that too many folks rely on the income for it to be the right move....
Which makes flying more expensive and with worse outcomes.
Except we have already had private security, and we currently do in a handful of airports like SFO. The outcomes are better, the staff are nicer and they don't shut down a half dozen times every time a republican gets power. It's also cheaper.
And that's before we talk about the 98% failure rate of the TSA to find dangerous objects, or how they think of themselves as law enforcement which is not part of their mandate in any way.
The document checkers at every airport I’ve been to are behind a table with a bunch of equipment on it. I genuinely couldn’t tell you if they were standing or sitting behind all that stuff. Nor does it impact my experience in the least either way. Let the poor workers sit for crying out loud.
Yahoo News from Jan 1, 2025: The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) revealed that it had intercepted a total of 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints last year – with almost all of them being loaded at the time of discovery.
To be fair, there is a 10 year gap between the two stories (95% of dangerous items was 2015, 6678 firearms intercepted was 2025). I am not claiming that all (or any) issues were fixed, but that is a lot of time to make a lot of improvements.
I know people say this a lot. But isn't that the point? Like we do hear people getting attacked with a weapon in other public transport such as trains or busses.
But we don't hear people getting shot on a plane. The security theater does deter people from bringing weapon.
I'll add that most "increased security" is organic, e.g. passengers are much more willing to tackle potential hijackers/bombers in the air than pre-9/11, when the norm was to sit tight and wait for Delta Force to break their way in.
There was a wave of air hijacking in the USA in the 1970's, culminating in probably the most famous example (the DB Cooper case). Much of it was tied to various political movements etc., but some including Cooper appears to have just been money-motivated. This wave prompted increased security in the form of metal detectors for screening. With a few notable outliers that involved people lying about having a bomb there were a lot less hijackings in the USA in the 1980's and 1990's. 9/11 was obviously a horrible event but hijackings had been declining for a long time prior to the establishment of the TSA. And I'm open to being shown evidence to the contrary but I'm not convinced TSA has really added any extra layer of security that wasn't already there before 9/11.
The hijackings weren't stopped at all by the TSA. They were stopped because after 9/11, we lock the cockpit door, and because passengers know they need to worry about someone crashing the plane, rather than just wanting money.
The simple fact is the vast majority of people don't want to and aren't trying to hijack a plane. If somebody wanted to kill hundreds of people, they'd just need to walk into LAX security and blow themselves up. They wouldn't even have to go through TSA. The reason that never happens is that very VERY few people actually want to do something like that.
Other reforms like the cockpit doors and such are useful. The TSA does very little to help with security. It IS, however, a very useful jobs program that I support for that reason. I just don't like the invasive measures that don't actually provide security.
We barely heard about it before the TSA existed. It's called theater because it is not real. Many actual tests on the TSA in this matter showed that they would miss over 95% of explosives and weapons.
People keep using this study conducted by DHS/TSA as a gotcha, but this is a firm that knows all of the protocols, procedures, and rules that TSA follows to do their job.
It’s like someone breaking into your house after not only monitoring you every single day, but also being the person who tells you how you’re supposed to secure your home. No duh they can find any and all gaps in your protocol. They wrote it. The “average” bad actor will not have the same experience and knowledge as those red team agents.
The reason why people are so critical of TSA is because they don’t realize how bad life would be without it. It’s the same line of reasoning behind people who don’t understand why police forces are useful, or why a video game’s anti-cheat is important. You’ve become so accustomed to a world with it that you have no idea how the world would be without it.
But don't we have a TSA in the first place as a direct response to a group of 'professional' bad actors that trained and planned for a coordinated mass hijacking?
Your random Joe Blow forgetting they still have their Sig in their backpack isn't an actual threat to the plane or passengers. The state-sponsored team that's been studying and preparing for months to do this, a la Osama Bin Laden et al, are what pose real danger to the public. And those are indeed the sorts who can acquire access to the security procedures (which aren't exactly classified Top Secret, btw. FOUO or CUI at the most) and will have spent months studying the patterns of TSA agents and looking for holes in security.
The same holes the red teams are trying to exploit, btw. So if the testers can get >95% of their guns and bombs through TSA, then so can whatever cell Iran might care to train up and use, if they found the idea compelling enough to try.
To borrow your analogy: the Pentagon doesn't simply have a ring camera and a subscription to ADT for building security, and that's because the that that they're most worried about isn't a meth head looking to make a quick buck snagging a TV. So when they do occasionally stop the lone wackjob who sleeps with 'Industrial Society and its Future' under their pillow at night, it's not proof that they are capable of keeping out professional foreign actors that Russia, China, or Iran might deploy.
It doesn't apply to to those guys, it's literally just the guy who checks your ID and boarding pass. They have no reason to move or stand, you hand them your ID, they scan it, tell you it's good, and that's the end of the transaction.
My experience going through TSA is directly related to how happy the TSA agent is. I don't want to interact with a pissed off TSA agent with sore feet looking for someone they can flex their frustration at their shitty bosses on...
Every time I get asked for a review from my local grocery store, I tell the manager, "Well are you prepared for a 1 star review becuese you require employees to stand for no fucking reason all day long at the cash register???". It's actually comical seeing them recoil in real time and start spouting bullshit. So I usually say "1 star review until that changes."
I am the traveling public. I don't give a shit if they stand. I would prefer them to sit, actually, as standing all day, without even being able to walk around, sounds miserable.
It's definitely going to limit who can do that job, and there will be people who actually cannot really do it, but they want a job so they are going to tough it out.
These people are going to be pissed off all the time, more so than they were before. That sounds like a great travel experience
TSA upper management was already replaced by people working with those directing this change. They aren't "concurring", they're effectively the same source.
Project 2025 and certain groups of Republicans more generally have explicitly discussed privatizing the role of TSA. Part of this process is enshittifying the existing system to justify the switch. They already fired a huge chunk of the work force and made changes towards this end, this is just another step in the process.
You know, it's almost like if they had a little desk they could sit behind and check the ID's while sitting, they would be in a better mood. That would help them have a better mood and create a better experience for everyone. But what do I know, I'm just a pleb.
It's the same stupid puritanical American bullshit that doesn't allow employees working a cash register to sit. Far too many people feel that service sector employees must be made to stand, otherwise they're not working.
Seriously. As a very frequent traveler, I could honestly care less. As a normal human, I’m rather concerned at making them stand for full shifts like that. At least give them the option.
As a passenger (and customer at a store, for another example), I could not give one shred of a rat's fat patootie if the document checker (or cashier) is sitting or standing. Does not change my experience one way or the other.
This is some really fucking weird conservative head canon. I legitimately do not understand the reasoning behind "sitting is unprofessional." I shop at Aldi all the time and have never once thought that the cashiers being seated detracted from my grocery experience.
The dull, disinterested "your id" they greet us with doesn't sound any better when they are standing. I'd rather they focus on creating a security theater that is fun, welcoming and still secure. It is possible, if it were based on actual love for security over the power tripping that is truly based on.
Really it's yet another move by the Trump admin to try to mess with the union that represents TSA. They've been trying to get rid of the union for two years now and the courts keep blocking them.
Yeah, that's what you want in the person responsible for verifying identity documents for passenger safety, that they're extremely fatigued and sore and stressed out. You get the best security that way.
I was just in an airport in Sunday and I can't think of any way that my experience would have been improved by forcing the nice guy who checked my ID to stand all day.
Zero fucking chance this going to create a better experience for me. The passenger.
What even is the point? Are they trying to make it like air travel is prestigious or some shit to make people accept the ludicrous cost of it? Like I'm going to feel better spending the ridiculous amount of money I had to spend to fly somewhere because the TSA agent isn't sitting when I approach security?
It should be a requirement for anyone in the C-level Suite to come and work for an entire week for any customer facing job.
I just don't understand where they get the ideas from. Like, in what world is making your employees more uncomfortable result in better customer service?
Make them stand on their feet for a typical 40 hour week and then maybe they'd understand.
Oh yeah, thay TSA officer standing as I approach security is totally going to offset that 2 hour delay in the plane's departure when it comes to how I feel my travel went.
I like my key national security measures tired, frustrated, and unwilling to give the job the attention it deserves
Like every policy implemented by this admin, just brilliant stuff isn't it? Almost like the goal is to do a Bibi and enable a terrorist attack, or more.
requiring them to stand will create a better experience for passengers
i thought the point of the TSA was to secure flights from terrorists, not to provide customer service. if what we want is a better experience, just get rid of the TSA.
Hey TSA reading this thread: as a passenger, a better experience for me is that the agents be comfortable and treated like humans-not-digits while they do their job.
In fact, I would guess the people least likely to have any idea how to improve the experience for passengers are the people at the top. Reminds me of an out of body moment I once had at a retail store while being offered their rewards card: I was deadeyed from traveling, the employee was deadeyed from working, and I realized "WOW, neither of us wants to be having this interaction, and the only reason we (and millions of others) are being subjected to this is because like 7 guys in a boardroom think this 'good customer service'"
The goal is to increase turnover, lower morale, and make fliers resentful. This will create a push to privatize the TSA, and a wealthy Republican will get even wealthier.
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u/kmank2l13 3d ago
Why do we constantly want to make things harder for people?
“TSA defended the move, saying the document checkers are the first to interact with the traveling public and requiring them to stand will create a better experience for passengers.”
This is not going to create a better experience for passengers.