About 1,279 screeners at San Francisco International Airport have been put on layoff notice effective November 30, because the federal government is moving the airport’s passenger and baggage screening contract from one private firm to another. The notice covers workers employed by Covenant Aviation Security, which has run screening at the airport since 2002, and the incoming company is VMD Corp., a subsidiary of Xcelerate Solutions. An airport worker-retention policy calls for the new contractor to keep the existing workforce for a 90-day trial period, which makes this a handover with a layoff notice attached rather than a plain shutdown.
The money at stake is the paychecks of more than a thousand checkpoint and baggage-screening workers, and the open question is what the new employer offers them and for how long.
What the Covenant notice and the 1,279 figure show
California’s Employment Development Department publishes WARN notices in a statewide report, and its own page states that the federal WARN Act requires employers to give written notice at least 60 days before a mass layoff, plant closure, or relocation. That report is distributed as a spreadsheet download, and it could not be read as text during this review. The count and notice date therefore rest on two secondary compilations. The aggregator Labor Current lists Covenant Aviation Security with 1,279 employees affected, a layoff notice dated September 28, 2026, and no effective date. The trade publication AviationPros, in an October 1 report, gives the figure as approximately 1,279 employees and the effective date as November 30, 2026.
The count is the number of workers formally noticed, not a tally of jobs destroyed. The trade report says SFO officials do not expect the contractor change to disrupt screening at the airport, which is the practical sign that the work continues even though the employer of record changes.
Why the screening contract is changing hands
San Francisco International takes part in the Transportation Security Administration’s Screening Partnership Program, under which qualified private contractors screen passengers and bags under federal oversight. The trade report says the Government Accountability Office denied a protest by Covenant in February 2026, and that VMD takes over operations on December 1, 2026. A separate announcement carried by AJOT describes the award as a five-year contract under that program covering passenger and checked-baggage screening, security-area oversight and training…