A three-year labor agreement between 44,400 Transportation Security Administration screeners and the TSA was announced today by  the American Federation of Government Employees union. The vote was 17,326-1,774.

The union says the deal will:

• Provide improved uniforms and permits uniform variations to account for weather and temperature.
• Provide a greater degree of consistency and fairness on issues like annual leave bidding and shift trades.
• Provide a stable and consistent process for shift bidding and movement between full- and part-time.

 “It was a good turnout — I wasn’t sure because they gave us limited time to vote — but it was half the workforce, and it was 10-1, a landslide,” Stacy Bodtmann, a screener at Newark Liberty, told the Star-Ledger.

When the TSA was established after 9/11, TSA mangement was given the right to decide if workers could unionize, the Star-Ledger said. That did not happen until 2010, “ with the provision that pay and security-related issues were not negotiable.”