Security Guards Going Union

    Good piece today by Steve Greenhouse in The New York Times on the drive to organize security guards.

For Michael Johnson, a security guard for 16 years, unionization cannot happen soon enough.

Mr. Johnson says the $10 an hour he earns guarding an office tower on Wilshire Boulevard is too little to support his family, so he has taken a second full-time job, guarding a construction site. His long hours exact a toll on him as a father: he leaves home at 6:15 a.m., before his four children wake up, and returns at 11 p.m., after they have gone to bed.

“Ten dollars an hour is not good,” he said. “You have to work too hard to make it. I shouldn’t have to work two jobs. I can’t do this forever.”

Mr. Johnson is among more than 70,000 office-building security guards nationwide whom the Service Employees International Union is trying to organize this summer, a group that in many cities is more than 50 percent African-American. Those cities include Los Angeles, where, the service employees say, guards’ pay averages $8.50 an hour, or about $17,700 a year for a 40-hour week.

The city’s black clerics are rallying behind the unionization drive, which has borrowed the vocabulary and history of the civil rights movement.

“This parallels what Dr. King was doing in Memphis when he was killed,” said the Rev. Eric Lee, chief operating officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. “He was speaking out on behalf of African-American sanitation workers, who had poor wages and poor working conditions, and it’s the same thing for security officers here.”