Political Quotes

“Mr. President, listening to my friend from Mississippi talk about deficits--and we have to be concerned about deficits. The first thing on which they cannot bargain is pay. That is not something they can bargain on. Generally, Federal employees do not bargain on pay, I might add. So I do not know what that means. I mean, he is talking about deficits, but they cannot bargain about pay anyway. Then he talked about the FBI and the CIA and the Secret Service, that they did not collectively bargain. Those agencies all deal with very highly sensitive national security information. What are we talking about here? We are talking about the people who check your bags. We are talking about the people at screenings and who do the patdowns, but we are also talking about an agency that has one of the highest turnovers of any Federal agency. I do not want a high turnover rate among those people at the airport. I want them to be highly skilled, highly trained, highly motivated. I want a good morale system there. Everyone says it is one of the lowest in terms of morale and has one of the highest turnovers of any Federal agency. Giving these people the right to organize and to bargain collectively on things that are not of national security measures--not pay, not emergency procedures, but other things that make life a little bit better for them so they know basically: What is the procedure for me being posted here, what is the procedure for me working at 2 a.m.…”