Reading the Record, Part Two: The Absence Data: What TSA Measured, and What It Shows

The central factual claim in the determination to end collective bargaining is that the 2024 agreement drove up unscheduled absences and, with them, the risk to security.

The determination states that the agreement's sick leave terms, which let officers self-certify absences of three days or fewer, increased callouts to a degree that undermined mission readiness. The evidence for this claim sits in Tab 3 of the administrative record. It is worth reading closely, because the data the agency assembled does not behave the way the determination says it does.

The Provision

Start with the provision itself, because the determination's causal claim is more complicated than it first appears. The determination blames the three-day self-certification rule for rising absences. That rule is not a creation of the 2024 agreement. It is longstanding TSA policy. The agency's own Handbook to Management Directive 1100.63-1, in effect since 2011, states at Section 9 that "generally, employee self-certification will be sufficient for absences of three workdays or less." The same threshold appears in the prior collective bargaining agreement and in the 2024 agreement. Officers could self-certify short absences before the 2024 agreement and after it.

That much cuts against attributing the provision itself to the 2024 agreement. But there is a second piece, and honesty about the record requires stating it. What the 2024 agreement changed was not the self-certification threshold. It was the enforcement process around it. Under TSA's directive, an employee showing excessive unscheduled sick leave "may be placed on leave restriction," with little process required. The 2024 agreement replaced that with a structured regime: management must identify a documented pattern over six months, meet with the employee before imposing restriction, review the restriction every three months, and let it expire unless formally renewed. Management retained the power to address abuse, but the path to using it became more demanding.

This is what several Federal Security Directors pointed to when the agency surveyed them, and it is addressed directly in Part Three of this series. Their complaint was not that self-certification is new. It was that the agreement made it harder to act on the absences self-certification covers. That is a real change, and an analysis of this record has to acknowledge it.

It also, however, sharpens rather than resolves the central question. The determination did not argue that the agreement weakened leave-restriction procedures. It argued that the self-certification provision drove absences up. And the self-certification provision, the thing the determination actually named, is the part that did not change. Whether the restriction process is the real driver is a question the determination did not ask and the data that follows does not answer in the determination's favor. What the data does show is that the absence numbers move with the season, not the contract, which is the subject of the rest of this article.

The Baseline

To show that the 2024 agreement increased absences, the determination compares the period under that agreement to the year before it took effect. That prior year runs from May 24, 2023 to May 23, 2024. The nationwide unscheduled absence rate during that baseline year was 4.09 percent. Under the 2024 agreement, from May 24, 2024 to February 27, 2025, it was 4.75 percent.

The three-day self-certification provision was in force during both periods, because it is agency policy that predates both. A provision common to both sides of a comparison cannot explain a difference between them.

What the Rest of the Table Shows

The agency did not stop at two numbers. It recorded the nationwide rate across several periods and recorded specific months. Those figures reveal a pattern the determination does not address.

After the February 2025 determination rescinded the agreement, the nationwide rate was 3.93 percent, measured from late February to early June 2025. After a court restored the agreement, the rate was 4.35 percent, measured from early June to the end of July 2025. The determination presents this as evidence that the agreement drives absences up and its removal brings them down.

But the agency's own month-specific data tells a different story about why those numbers move. December 2024, a period fully under the agreement, shows a nationwide rate of 5.34 percent. April 2025, a period without the agreement, shows 3.91 percent. June 2025 shows 4.29 percent.

December is the winter holiday travel peak, and absences rise across the system every year in that period. The window the determination uses to show the effect of rescission, late February through early June, is the same window in which absences seasonally decline regardless of what governs them. The window it uses to show the effect of reinstatement, June through July, is the start of the summer travel season, when they rise again.

The Large Hub Data

The large hub data makes the seasonal pattern impossible to miss, because it holds the airport constant and lets the month vary.

Phoenix Sky Harbor, which the determination singles out as its illustrative example, shows an unscheduled absence rate of 10.10 percent in December 2024 and 4.84 percent in April 2025. Same airport, same contract status, five months apart, and the rate more than halves. Seattle-Tacoma shows 8.81 percent in December and 5.33 percent in April. These swings dwarf the differences the determination attributes to the presence or absence of the agreement.

Look next at what the agency labeled the increase after reinstatement. In the large hub table, the column measuring the change when the agreement returned shows small numbers, and at several of the busiest airports in the country, it shows decreases. Dallas-Fort Worth went down 0.06 percent. Fort Lauderdale went down 0.18 percent. Houston went down 0.21 percent. Orlando went down 0.18 percent.

The dataset the agency built to demonstrate that the agreement increases absences shows, at a meaningful share of the largest airports, that its reinstatement changed almost nothing or reduced absences.

The Phoenix Figure

The determination uses Phoenix in December 2024 as its dramatic figure. It reports that in that month the average daily unscheduled absence rate reached 10.1 percent, resulting in nearly 2,000 employee shifts needing coverage.

That number is accurate. It is also the single highest-absence airport in the single highest-absence month in the dataset. Presenting it as evidence of a contract effect, without noting that December produces the same spike at airports across the country whether or not the agreement is in force, tells the reader something true about Phoenix in December and something misleading about the agreement.

Check It Yourself

None of this requires trusting our interpretation. The figures are in Tab 3 of the record, on pages Bates-stamped DHS_Sept2025_CAR_508 through 516. The self-certification provision is in the CBA at Article 17 and in the 2011 Handbook at Section 9. A reader can lay the provision beside the baseline year, and the December rate beside the April rate, and see what the numbers do.

What the Record Shows

What the determination needed to show was that collective bargaining, specifically, increased absences. What the record shows is a workforce whose absence rate rises in winter and falls in spring, by margins far larger than any difference the presence of the agreement produced, and a sick leave provision the agency itself has maintained as policy since 2011.

The agency measured the right things. The measurements do not support the conclusion drawn from them.

Part three examines the survey of the agency's own Federal Security Directors, and what they reported about the agreement's strengths.

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