In an interview this week with CNBC, Brian Kelly “The Points Guy” called TSA workers “relatively unskilled.” He was dragged by pundits but was he wrong?
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Brian Kelly Appears On CNBC Speaking About AI
This week, Brian Kelly, founder of ThePointsGuy.com (now owned by a media conglomerate and credit card reselling company, Red Ventures) appeared on CNBC’s Squawk On The Street to talk about Memorial Day weekend travel. In a five minute interview he highlighted travel predictions for the coming weekend (and year), the infrastructure bill and lack of funding for a much needed air traffic control overhaul, and AI.
When asked about how AI could benefit travelers he spoke about how it should be used in the TSA process:
His comments were instantly dragged online for being insensitive to frontline TSA workers for calling them “relatively unskilled.”
Yeah, TSA is annoying. But calling agents who are paid like $40k a year or less is just gratuitous and unnecessary – especially coming from a millionaire horse ranch owner https://t.co/G7UiGTjOru
— Kyle Potter (@kpottermn) May 24, 2023
Mr. Kelly took no time in issuing an apology video for his words in a story on Facebook and Instagram. Stories are only visible for 24 hours from posting and then disappear which was also panned as tonedeaf.
What Qualifies As Skilled?
Kelly called TSA frontline workers “relatively unskilled” but that begs the question, what is considered skilled? Here’s a post for a TSO (Transportation Safety Officer) role at Pittsburgh International Airport.
There’s no degree required, the job is hourly starting at $20/hour or $40,800/year and is listed by the agency itself as “part-time security guard.”
According to the site JobTestPrep.com, requirements are limited. Training lasts 120 hours (three working weeks) including a number of field tests and online exams.
“…when including the assignments done through the Online Learning Center (OLC) and fieldwork, training comes out to about 120 hours in total. The training program begins with eight classes each start week, with each of the classes having 24 students assigned to three instructors.
The Online Learning Center includes assignments, such as X-ray operations, operating machinery while scanning for explosives, body searches, and searching baggage. Additionally, training also includes handling and sharing sensitive information making training all that more important.
Like all employees of the United States Government, Transportation Security Officers must undergo a number of tests before being assigned to a post. These tests include written tests, third-party evaluations, and image interpretation tests.”
The definition of a skilled worker is anyone who has trained for their position and learned job-specific information but that’s unhelpful. The broad definition makes nearly any role with rudimentary training a “skilled” position.
“of, relating to, or requiring workers or labor with skill and training in a particular occupation, craft, or trade” – Merriam-Webster
By comparison, law enforcement training lasts 13-19 weeks with some programs extending to 26 weeks – roughly 5-9 times the amount of training. Starbucks trains its baristas 80-120 hours to make coffee.
Is He Wrong?
There are good employees and bad employees in any field, those that are good at their jobs and those that are not. TSA is a far cry from advanced security processes like those employed in Israel. Kelly is not wrong that technology can and should be used better throughout the screening process.
He’s not wrong that some of the frontline staff are relatively unskilled in that their training and experience are not commensurate with the high-level security needs of our nation’s airways. Though the TSA has improved its results, it remains notoriously bad at catching guns going through security, failing to detect firearms about 80-90% of the time according to their own testing.
Unaware of the rules of interstate commerce (you can take whatever amount of cash you’d like, there’s no need to declare ANY amount) agents have illegally confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He used the pre-emptive word, “relatively” and in my interpretation that leads to an understanding that the agency is hiring all the time, worker retention is not ideal, and many TSOs may be new in their position with little practical work experience.
However, based on the definition of “skilled worker” he is wrong to call them unskilled. That’s more down to the mechanics of the definition than a statement about the role’s minimal initial training and employee turnover.
The fact that the person making your complex coffee order goes through roughly the same amount of training as a person designated to identify security threats is a concern. And he’s right to say that technology can help.
Conclusion
I don’t make it a habit of defending Brian Kelly, The Points Guy himself. While I am sure he is best suited reviewing loyalty programs and promoting the TPG app over defining adequate training for the TSA, he’s wrong about this only in definition alone. And while he calls the workers relatively unskilled and that feels elitist and repugnant, there are no requirements (other than passing a background check and a drug test – neither of which require skill.) Minimal training is reflective of the agency – not the workers. If Starbucks, for example, required just 8 hours of training, they too would be unskilled and commensurate for the task at hand, the agency’s requirements fit the bill of not providing and testing for adequate skill. The communist apology video Kelly issued only further cements for me that his comments were hijacked for more than they were by a public that remains desperately offended by the slightest inconvenient truth.
For those who remain on the fence, I’d ask you this: if your barista failed to make your Grande Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino incorrectly 80-90% of the time, would you consider them skilled at their job? If the answer is no, then those wagging their fingers at Kelly should quietly sit down and shut up.
What do you think?
They are absolutely “unskilled” in terms of labor as there is no specific education or skill required to be hired by TSA. It is for this reason that calling them “officers” is an insult to actual law enforcement officers who pass challenging skills tests and undergo lengthy training. Pretending that TSA personnel are something more doesn’t make us any safer.
Doug, I started with the TSA in January. I am STILL in training. …Because of all of the situations that we encounter with different types of passengers. Handicapped persons, people who speak no english… the list is endless.
We get checked on our skills constantly and training is continual.
Your reply is way off base.
I agree with his statement however look who is making that statement. What are his skills? Other than shilling credit cards. His only knowledge of aviation (like most bloggers) is from riding in back. But in his mind like many that makes him an expert on all things airline.
He is not only a very successful businessman but worked in finance in NYC before starting TPG. Weird to attack his skills…
How does working in finance make you skilled? The largest bankruptcy in US history was caused by “skilled” finance workers. He did one thing successfully, sold his business, and now rides on brand. Good for him, but he provides no value or service anymore.
Someone just earned himself a lifetime of strip searches at the airport
They are skilled.
Skilled at standing around, twerking, being rude, having chipped crazy nails, and being a horrific representation of America to the civilized world.
Whenever the topic of low skill and pay comes to mind, I’m reminded of when I was 19 and got my first jobs as a gas station or grocery store clerk and how those were the most difficult jobs I held in my life. The skillset was low, but I was expected to move quickly and be self motivated with zero “training” or buffer in getting up to speed. I was reprimanded in both jobs where I quit one and was fired from the other. In the gas station job, a guy put an envelope in a safe that was fished out and he was expected to compensate the station of $600 out of his own pocket. Yes, in theory, it could be argued maybe he pocketed the money himself, but the station owners had no protocol for ensuring witnesses that the money had been properly secured. I don’t know what happened with the guy. If I was me, I’d have quit on the spot and let them take me to court over it.
I quickly found jobs that paid similarly, but were a lot less stressful. One was a clerk at a JC Pennies department store where I stood at the counter and rang customers up on average coming in about 10 per hour. I spent time chatting with the other clerks and workers and it was a pretty fun job, actually.
So sure, if you see a TSA worker just “standing around”, perhaps they are one of those who have a political connection that looks the other way at their shenanigans but I’ve seen that in tons of other jobs that pay well. In a corporate IT environment, it wasn’t uncommon for a quarter of the people there to have gotten hired as part of a kickback scheme to the manager from some bodyshop firm or their relative. In my own case, at the supermarket job back in the 1980’s, I recall I got chewed out by the boss because I was taking a breather for literally a minute and sipping some soda after having chased shopping carts and picked up random messes for the previous hour. As far as the boss was concerned: If he saw me relaxing sipping that soda, he thinks I could have been doing that for a whole hour, not a single minute.
Another aspect of “low skill” is also mind numbing boredom. Part of a prison punishment is boredom (I’m not making that hypothesis on experience! 🙂 Making people suffer from not engaging them mentally to grow into a better role. To make them “serve time” where they leave 5 years older, but not a day wiser. In that regard, people are being paid for their “time” and if paid low, certainly their motivation is low particularly if the public is watching them continuously.
Consider the low success rate of finding contraband at checkpoints. That’s not the fault of the workers, but rather the management that fails to engage in regular feedback, training, and review of how the employees do their work not weekly, but daily. Look at the dogs: They are trained CONTINUOUSLY where they are literally not allowed to eat without “finding” contraband. If the TSA checkpoints are not probed continuously and then provided training feedback, whose that on? The low paid workers or the management?
Well, based on experience, I can tell you the female dogs working TSA are allowed to eat. A lot.
Shaquisha isn’t skipping meals, let’s put it like that.
Please spare us the scaremongering, a la DHS/TSA.
I’ve yet to be blacklisted by the TSA, and I’m more consistently critical of the DHS/TSA nonsense than most are.
Weren’t you the one denied Swedish citizenship? Maybe pipe down.
Not sure who you are talking about with your non-sequitur mentioning of Sweden, but I’ve never even been interested in applying to become a citizen of any country in which I have spent or will ever spend more than 180 days in my lifetime. And each and every administrative decision I’ve sought on my own personal behalf from any governments in Europe has always been positively in my favor and I continue to have a perfect record.
I’m an American nationalist who for most of my life was opposed to dual-citizenship. Still can’t cross that bridge to applying or accepting citizenship of any country other than the country of my birth.
I think “Sara” is trying to tell us that they despise Black women…
Probably lost their man to a black woman
Yes, every argument in America can be reduced to who gets j1zzed up in their oyster bag by whom. Good thinking, Billy Bob.
Let’s pay a bunch of people peanuts and expect them to care about their job. What could go wrong?
Cancel all welfare and these people will jog to work and do it well. There’s absolutely not a labor shortage in America; there’s an oversupply of EBT cards.
Let’s face it. Most of these lazybones have zero skills except niche OnlyFans for people attracted to landwhales or the skills for TSA (same). Without welfare they’d happily take 40K for doing the nothing the TSA does.
Ah, the old welfare queen bit
Let’s just bring back the security we had before TSA… nobody ever got weapons past them!
I can explain it to you, missy, I can’t understand it for you.
How about this: we make welfare voluntary. You can pay for it if you want to. I’m not sure what weapons have to do with anything, but I’d rather fly with zero TSA than with Galonga manning the scanner.
Then it’s too bad you weren’t on one of the 9/11 hijacked planes… you know.. the reason TSA was created
Well, maybe America should stop bombing innocent brown people abroad. Problem solved.
Yea.. well… they probably should
“Cancel all welfare and these people will jog to work and do it well.”
All nice in theory, but when a disabled mother and family of 4 dies on the street, then there’s the uproar about it. Actually, minimum wage wouldn’t be necessary IF there was a restriction on hiring cheap labor immigrants but there would be many businesses that would, er, go out of business and the wealthy businessmen pay lobbyists to lobby the politicians to look the other way. The cost of living goes up AND wages go down and the welfare state is there to basically subsidize mediocre or corrupt business leaders.
We are rapidly heading towards a society in which AI has replaced most blue and white collar jobs. Unless we subsidize everyone that will be out of work.. buckle up, it’s not going to be pretty
When the TSA acknowledged an 80% fail rate, the problem is not the hires but the agency itself. Perhaps it’s time to completely revise what they need to accomplish, and then focus on how to train people to successfully to do the job.
Automation replaces blue collar jobs, AI will replace many white collar jobs.
Maybe Kelly wants to get crotched a bit more often…?
He left out “ incompetent” and “unaccountable “.
It is so difficult for me to objectively evaluate whether they are skilled or not because I have such little respect for the way a large number of agents conduct themselves on the job. Everything from the agent who could not be more disinterested at reviewing my ID to the agent yelling at me to where to stand in line, to the one inevitably barking inconsistent instructions from one airport to the other (sometimes one terminal to the other). For the most part, they are horrible at dealing with people and therefore terrible at reading people…and if you are terrible at reading people, and you work in security, I just can’t see the value add.
Nobody asked you to evaluate them, though. The article does a great job already.
The racist tropes you’re peddling seem like an effort to discredit the overdue and understated criticism of DHS/TSA from non-racists.
Your exhibition of racism makes you come across as being insecure like crazy. Profound insecurity is typically the motivation for racists being racists. An inferiority complex, fear and related feelings of insecurity are the life force of white supremacist loser and, ironically perhaps, the oxygen for the DHS/TSA fanboys and cheerleaders.
Not sure who you are talking about with your non-sequitur mentioning of Sweden, but I’ve never even been interested in applying to become a citizen of any country in which I have spent or will ever spend more than 180 days in my lifetime. And each and every administrative decision I’ve sought on my own personal behalf from any governments in Europe has always been positively in my favor and I continue to have a perfect record.
I’m an American nationalist who for most of my life was opposed to dual-citizenship. Still can’t cross that bridge to applying or accepting citizenship of any country other than the country of my birth.
I liked it better when you said it the first time.
I was bored the first time you got “like really mad and like stuff”, but it’s even more boring the second time.
Also, your wife’s boyfriend doesn’t think you’re cool for yelling racist at people. It doesn’t mean anything and you’ve overused that slur a lot.
Or in your nomenclature; “omg, like, cut it out”.
I have to for the first time agree with him.
The weird thing is he seems more publicly apologetic about his TSA comment than about some other stuff that is way more questionable than placement of the TSA screener jobs on the skilled-unskilled spectrum.
The job of the TSA screeners and travel document checkers could be done even by average 13-15 year old kids. Isn’t that by definition probably a “relatively unskilled” job?
There is dignity to be found in most honest work, whether it’s skilled or unskilled. What there is no dignity in is some of the junk the TSA does to at least some American travelers.
I’m a first year college student right now. My first job was at a fast-casual restaurant. We got paid minimum wage + tips (which in FL let’s tipped employees be paid $7.98 an hour). The job was to assemble what the guest wanted from a buffet style line. It was SO BUSY!!! During the lunch rush, you would have a line out of the door for 2 hours constantly while taking care of 2-3 guests a minute. While that is a minimum wage job, the people that work there are definetly not unskilled! The TSA has an easier job in terms of stress and just have to focus, but they get paid more than many jobs which require harder work. Now I wish I worked as a TSA agent…
I suppose that the big question is how effective and how fast are the systems in other countries with similar technology compared to ours.
I absolutely agree with you!
I would add that beyond the poor job TSA does too many of them have an attitude of don’t question my authority.
No formal education requirements. Three weeks of training does not make them skilled. The pay rate also shows it’s unskilled.
Sorry but snowflakes and woke culture don’t make TSA employees skilled.
The attacks on Brian Kelly are opportunistic
What does “woke culture” have to do with any of this?
Not allowed to call it what it is because it might upset them or denigrate them. It’s an unskilled job with minimal training, plain and simple.
It just means something they don’t understand and therefore don’t like. For example… advanced calculus is woke
Lol
Come on, really? You deleted my comment for either repeating what was said on HBO by Tony Soprano about Vito? Which by the way is still available on MAX. Feel free to subscribe.
Or about a valid accusation about TPG and his usage of drugs that has been documented?
So one of two things is true. Either 1)He meant what he said but later wasn’t willing to stand by those words so he apologized or 2) he didn’t mean what he said and honestly apologized. Neither is a good look. He seems like a really savvy guy so I’d guess #1 is what really happened.
Who has the ability to put people on the no fly list? It’d be pretty amusing if it happened to him…
The Biden Administration isn’t so stupid as to put upper income Americans on the aviation related blacklists just for peacefully and publicly repeating something that even many senior government officials have thought about the TSA and say in private: it’s a poorly-operating, awfully-managed government agency with the relatively unskilled workforce it deserves and then some.
Mr. Kelly. Please contact the TSA and request training on their scanning machines. Then scan some real luggage (under the supervision of the unskilled TSA workers) . Lets see how skilled you are. You may be surprised. They are complex machines, with settings for electronics, organics, etc. And it is done under the pressure of the travelers watching you. You can feel them thinking….. why is this idiot taking so long! Realizing the entire time, if you make a mistake, hundreds may die. No pressure.
Humility is a is only a small part of one with great character.
The only thing the government does with skill is war and/or mass murder.
TSA is a makework-style welfare program that transfers money to people who are totally unemployable at any other job, in return for doing nothing. No one actually is unaware of this, there’s just clickbait and political motives involved in pretending otherwise for some.
I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that this welfare program was the spawn of a republican administration
I remember a friendly US Senator from my flights out of DCA to the Midwest who on TV and elsewhere would say federalization was needed to professionalize passenger security screening. He had the initials TD — not DT — and was the big D in the Senate at the time.
I have found some variance in the TSA. In parallel lines, one was pushing for ID and boarding passes while the other was only concerned with IDs. I feel the variance is an attempt to mix up protocols to throw PAX off.
Also, the TSA at my airport will post pictures of the various weapons confiscated near the entrance to the security area. Loaded handguns, knives, blades, ammo, an occasional critter, etc. Imagine staring at a screen trying to sort thru all brick-brace PAX shove into their carry on.
It’s working, but there will be some variance. Same with cops. Each with their own interpretation of the rules.
What never gets old is the excuse of the inconsistency from “security” types being there to “keep the bad guys on their toes and trip ‘em up”. That excuse is a very lousy one when it comes to passenger screening checkpoints.
The inconsistency at the TSA’s passenger screening checkpoints is mainly a consistent product of flawed control of processes, people, and technology in the face of resource constraints and resource allocation decisions.
What is the alternative? We need security at the airport and unless you start paying 6 figures and up you aren’t getting the cream of the crop
@ ted poco Then we go to a 90% fail rate. Not saying it won’t happen but AI is not there yet
…and then we have an army of college graduates – doctors, PHDs, engineers, etc…who are clueless about health, climate, etc….believing that CO2 is the cause of climate change (It rises after – see Scientific American – ice cores for starters), thinking microwaving your body with radiation constantly is a good idea……nevermind animals and the environment (Non-ionizing some engineers scream, oblivious to real world things going on right now – but my theory!! /s)… and I could go on….so skilled is quite relative. Most people are trained monkeys and follow a herd, that’s it. Darwin – those most adaptable will survive….oh….Wallace is more right then Darwin…but few have heard of him, nevermind what he learned on his voyages around the world.
Many “rich/smart” folks are only good at a few focused things – relatively speaking.
Monkey on….
Unskilled is the correct assessment. They need to set up the lines so people can keep visual sight of their valuables.