TSA Is on a Brown-Bag Strike — and Crippling Airports
TSA agents across the country are engaged in guerrilla organizing: an illegal, partial wildcat strike in protest of the government shutdown that has left them working for weeks on end without pay.
Despite the massive inconvenience of standing in lines for hours, many Americans seem to be sympathizing with the TSA workers’s sickout. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
It’s a common trope in US culture: people sitting in parks or on front porches drinking from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
What’s the point of that bag of paper? It forces a choice. A police officer who sees someone drinking from a brown bag must choose between investigating further and taking action or looking the other way. Critically, it’s the thinnest of veneers that provides the officer with enough plausible deniability to choose the latter. The officer didn’t see the label. They didn’t know what the person was drinking. And given that the officer had other more pressing priorities, they chose not to investigate any further.
To be clear, a brown bag over a bottle of alcohol is not an actual legal protection. Drinking in public in many places is a violation of open container and public intoxication laws. But there is still a valuable lesson here: enforcement is discretionary.
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