ARI SHAPIRO, Host:
Each day, two million people take off their shoes, separate the liquids in their carry-on luggage, and prepare to take a commercial flight. They all pass through airport security stations run by the Transportation Security Administration. The men and women of TSA are on the frontlines of the battle to keep the skies safe. They are also among the lowest paid of all federal employees, and they have one of the highest injury rates. NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR: Unidentified Man: Up. Everybody stand up. Jackets off, please. All right. Got the badges, (unintelligible), tags.
NAYLOR: Supervisor Linda Coleman warns TSOs they'll likely have their hands full today because of bad weather the night before.
LINDA COLEMAN: Unidentified Woman: Liquid, aerosol, and gel(ph) bags out of your luggage. All outerwear must come off.
NAYLOR: Charles McLong's job title is bomb assessment officer. He gets called in if something looks, as he puts it, hinky.
CHARLES MCLONG: Like this, this particular bag here. We have a couple of masses there of something. Now they look like they could be oranges, but, as we know, the explosives can be made of anything. You can make plastic explosives look like anything.
NAYLOR: Then there are the salaries, which start at about $25,000 a year, one of the lowest rates in the federal government. Anthony Hutchinson, a 29-year-old father of two, says not only is it not easy raising a family on what he earns, it affects what he calls the mission.
ANTHONY HUTCHINSON: This is a very, very important job. You're dealing with people's lives every single day. And if you have an officer sitting there worrying about how they're going to pay their rent or whether their car is going to be taken from them because they can't pay their car note or how their children are going to eat or how they're going to pay for this and pay for that, then you're not going to have an officer there, happy officer there thinking about the mission. And that's what comes first. The mission comes first.
NAYLOR: Back at Reagan National Airport, I asked Lee Kair about some of the TSO's complaints. Kair is in charge of security operations for TSA. He says the agency has made great strides in addressing the injury rate. He says fewer officers have been leaving, especially now with the economy, and that most have been with the agency since its inception.
LEE KAIR: So, our officers have extremely difficult jobs. And they are very, very professional in what they do, and they're very trained and they're skilled at how to interact with people. You know, and frankly, our officers are dealing with two million people every day, and so many of our officers have been here - most of our officers have been here, frankly, since the beginning. So they know how to interact with people and they know what doesn't look right, what that anomaly is, and they can focus on that.
NAYLOR: Brain Naylor, NPR News, Washington.