A word to the wise for air travelers
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What should air travelers know about TSA worker pay issues?
Wait times at airports could get longer next week. From Marketplace, I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer in for David Boncaccio. Airport security lines are growing as workers with the Transportation Security Administration go without pay during the partial government shutdown. Those lines could get worse if Congress can't reach an agreement to pay TSA officers by the end of next week, as Marketplace's Henry Epp reports.
Nearly 50,000 TSA workers missed a paycheck last week, and if Congress doesn't act, they could miss another one next Friday. That's led a few hundred TSA agents to quit, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC this week that about 10 percent of TSA officers are calling out of work on average. Duffy said that's about five times the usual call-out rate. And he said the situation at airports could get a lot worse next week if officers miss their next paycheck.
You're going to see small airports, I believe, shut down.
How is the partial government shutdown affecting airport security?
You're going to see extensive lines and air travel is going to almost come to a grid halt, stop.
Meanwhile, Congress is scheduled to go on recess at the end of next week. The union representing TSA workers urged lawmakers not to leave town until they agree on funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Parts of DHS, including the TSA, have lacked funding since mid-February. That's after congressional Democrats demanded reforms to federal immigration enforcement following the fatal shootings of Rene Good and Alex Preddy by federal officers in Minneapolis earlier this year. Republicans and Democrats have so far not been able to reach an agreement on those reforms. Thousands of FEMA, Coast Guard, and Border Patrol employees are also missing paychecks. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace.
Imagine you're applying for a job. A posting catches your eye. The pay range runs from $130,000 to nearly $500,000 a year. So where do you start negotiations? That range isn't hypothetical. It comes from an actual job listing on Indeed. About 15 states have past laws requiring companies to include salary ranges in job postings in part to help address wage gaps for women and people of color. But new research from Cornell University suggests the way those salary ranges are written, especially how wide or narrow they are, can influence how applicants approach negotiations. Alice Lee is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Cornell and lead author of the study. Alice joins us now. Welcome.
Happy to be here.
Let's stick with that real world example for a minute. Based on your research, how might someone, especially a woman, approach salary negotiations with a huge salary range like that?
So women on average tend to be more averse to financial uncertainty. And so if you see a wide range, you have very little idea of where you're actually going to land. Past work suggests that women, like I said, tend to be more risk averse than men. And due to that, we found that women on average were opting more into job postings that had narrower pay ranges, more so than men were.
Huh. Okay. So women prefer postings with narrow ranges. Is that a problem? I mean, are women hurt when they limit themselves that way?
The preference towards risk aversion in itself, I don't think is a problem. I think that is a natural tendency. And I think there's good reason to respond in this way to ambiguous signals. The problem isn't the preference in itself, but sort of what happens after that. What we found in our research is that those who apply to narrow ranges are then more satisfied with an average offer. They're less likely to initiate negotiations. And when they do, they make offers that are much less assertive, meaning lower, and are thus less likely to end up with a higher salary than those that might have applied to a wider salary range.
Oh, so interesting. So less likely to negotiate, lower salary in the end. So could these pay range transparency laws actually be perpetuating the very pay gaps they were designed to close?
I think that's exactly right.
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