Guards Demand Security

L.A.’s mostly-black security workforce makes a push to unionize.
by Seth Meyer

With Labor Day approaching, leaders from the labor movement and the black community met Aug. 25 to voice their support for unionizing private security guards, a low-wage job where blacks make up more than 60 percent of the workforce in Los Angeles.

Security workers have been trying to organize since 2002, but have faced opposition from the building managers and security contractors they work for, according to the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU hopes to mobilize the more than 70,000 office-building security guards working nationwide.

“There’s no security for people working security,” said John Wilson, a security officer in Los Angeles. “One company will come in and you’re making $11 an hour. Then another company will underbid them, and all of the sudden you’re making $8 an hour. Where’s the fairness?”

According to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the average wage for a security worker was about $18,700 a year, or $8.44 an hour in 2002; the poverty line for a family of four was about $18,400 a year.

Supporters say providing a working wage for these jobs would improve the communities where security guards live by plugging more money into local economies. Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, said 70 percent of security officers in Los Angeles live in
South Central neighborhoods.

“You have to professionalize,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Herb Wesson. “We have begun to take a profession and move it toward the middle class.”

Other supporters say this is not just an issue of fairness but, more importantly, one of national security. Low wages have led to high turnover rates, leaving many guards with little training or familiarity with their buildings. According to a study by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, security officer turnover rates range between 60 and 243 percent, while turnover among janitors is 5 percent.

“I didn’t raise this as just a labor management issue, but as a homeland security issue,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has urged employers to support guard unionization, told the New York Times in July.

“Think about 9/11,” said Wesson. “Who are the first responders?”

The SEIU hopes to model its unionizing efforts on a previous campaign for janitors. Several decades ago, janitorial jobs were unionized. But business owners began hiring cheaper immigrant labor, busting the union and forcing blacks into lower paying jobs. Now, after successful re-unionization, janitors make about $2.50 an hour more than security guards, according to Durazo.

Also under discussion by union leaders and black community representatives was the disappearance of many blacks from service jobs, specifically hotel workers. According to data released by the hotel workers union UNITE HERE, six of Los Angeles’s largest hotels had staffs that were less than 10 percent black in 2004.

“In the history of the labor movement, African Americans were janitors, they were hotel workers,” said Rev. Eric Lee, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “We sent our children through college as janitors and hotel workers. Then because of corporate culture, there was the busting of unions, they undermined working-class people by bringing in people that would work for less, and the reorganization of unions took place, but without African Americans.”

This reorganization left a sour taste among many blacks; several community leaders said scarred relationships must be healed before any progress can be made.

“We need unions because they provide better quality jobs, they provide a way for people to become middle-class and to live a quality of life that every American deserves when they put in a 40-hour week,” Lee said. “On the other hand, we’re dealing with the culture of the labor unions that has traditionally been less responsive to people of color.”

Lee said he hopes the changing dynamic of labor unions, most notably the increasing number of Latinos in positions of power, will unite workers of all races rather than fall victim to the “corporate culture of the labor union, where there’s institutional racism and discrimination that has perpetuated injustice toward people of color.

“There has to be a return to a focus of what is good for working people, not what is good for African Americans or what is good for Latinos,” Lee said.

According to University of California at Berkeley professor Stephen Pitts, citing U.S. Census data from 2000, 30 percent of black males age 18-65 in the L.A. area were unemployed; 27 percent of blacks worked at low-wage jobs.

“That’s a huge portion of the black community that has gotten out of bed and gone to work, and still can’t pay the bills,” Pitts said.

A proposal coauthored by Councilmen Eric Garcetti and Jack Weiss that would make business owners accountable for a minimum amount of training for security officers is currently in committee, according to an SEIU spokesman. LAA