(CBS) LOS ANGELES Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced the formation of a union for 4,000 security officers who work in high rises, office buildings and other real estate across the city in a move that would guarantee fair wages and affordable health care.
The union, a joint partnership with the Service Employees International Union, would provide security officers with the opportunity to organize, negotiate new contracts and transform low-wage employment into quality jobs that offer decent pay and access to affordable health care, according to the mayor’s office.
The unionization is the largest African-American labor-led effort currently in the country, said mayor spokesman Darryl Ryan. (more…)
As a person who worked as security officer within the last 5 years, I have very mixed feelings about this. My first impression of course was very positive because the pay for security work here in Southern California is crap compared to other states. Health insurance? HA! Just forget about it because most guards just can’t afford it.
Here is where I have some problems
#Increasing pay WILL NOT increase the quality of work in most cases. Security work is a very transient business where hiring and firing takes place every week mainly because it is grunt work. While there are guards out there who take their jobs seriously, many do not as finding shortcuts becomes the name of the game to make the time go faster. This is not a slight against security guards–it is just the nature of the job.
#When union officials talk about raising wages, what they are really looking at is how much of a cut they can get from “poorly paid” employees who oftentimes will not keep a close watch (fiscally) on their leadership.
#There are a lot of good, yet small security companies out there whose contracts with local businesses aren’t as lucrative as some folks would think. Making it mandatory for them to provide “affordable” health insurance and a increase in pay would put many of these operations out of business–resulting in an increase of unemployment.
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