THE INSURGENCY INSIDE
It takes a workforce of one to protect a building. But show L.A.'s security guards
Ten years ago, I was named president of my shop inside the International Association of Machinists, Local 201. I started as vice president, but the truth is I don't remember a lot about those days. Union meetings were occasions to smoke a lot of pot - and at the time I was nominated and voted in, I was reading a sports section. The same thing happened a few month later, and I became president.
The employees deserved better, even if I did eventually hold my own at the negotiating table and around the shop. Our key issues were a product of out-of-town corporate ownership - and the shop could have used a connection to nationwide support, something along the lines of what some members of the Service Employees International Union are involved with right now.
Four years into the Los Angeles local's contentious campaign to organize security guards in downtown high-rises, the stage is set for a national, prime-time labor battle. It would be hard to miss. As the battle heats up, the SEIU's D.C. office has been mailing out a small but imposing pamphlet bearing the iconically red, black, and green headline "It Takes a Nation of Millions" - lifted straight from the title of Public Enemy's 1988 call to arms. The pitch is perfect for a campaign within a fast-growing security industry whose workforce is about 65 percent black.
At a time when workers are being viciously attacked by corporate interests everywhere, a victory in this face-off would be a big step forward.
In a section entitled "Building a Movement, Not Fortifying Institutions," SEIU vice president Gerry Hudson's incendiary missive declares: "Traditional civil rights organizations, the progressive movement in general, and unions share the criticism of being stuck in a cycle of reaction. Too many union leaders are ready with a sound bite about the latest injustice or insult to the workers, but don't have a plan to deal with the reality facing a majority of workers."
Activists and officers from within the union worked up the "Nation of Millions" as a realistic counterpoint to the AFL-CIO's diversity hearings which, says Tyrone Freeman, the SEIU vice-president who approved the project and oversaw its development and local dissemination, are "superficial and an affront" to the needs of a core constituency.
"I thought it was important," Freeman adds. "The AFL was having diversity hearings, but they weren't addressing the reality of day-to-day reality for black workers." A final "summit" is scheduled for July 23, two days before the highly anticipated Chicago convention opens. Freemen sent the package to community media, particularly those with constituents of color.
Personally, my idea of revolutionary thinking is the Cali secession movement, so I'm hardly tripping off the revival of formerly controversial Gen-X iconography. The fact that organized labor has allowed blacks to step front, center, and free while the union movement is on the ropes brings to mind the appearance of gospel stars earlier this week at the All-Star Game in Detroit. How so? Because the War on Terror is struggling - and whenever the ties binding America's power structure begin to fray - black Americans are asked to step forward and represent (perhaps we're supposed to be thankful for post-slavery opportunities).
The "Nation of Millions" campaign is not about me - but that's fine. What makes politics radical is different for different people. This campaign is about invigorating a certain generation of maturing low-end worker, roughly aged from 30 to 40; they might swallow SEIU's nuts-and-bolts recruitment data easier once it's dipped in rebellion born of pop culture.
The sensibility is geared toward prospective members like William Edwards, who works security at a building near Figueroa and Olympic. Edwards is 39, has three kids and a wife on disability. Five mornings a week he drives up from his apartment near 98th and Broadway to be his building's first line of defense. For this, he makes $9 an hour. Edwards, who is thick and close-cropped in the fashion of southern-bred MC, Ma$e, thinks that after four years on the job he's worth a whole lot more, at least $13 or $14 an hour plus benefits.
"They're making money hand over fist in these buildings," he says, head bowed and still somewhat reluctant to talk. "We're getting the crumbs off the table. And we're the first ones they come to when something goes down."
About four years into the campaign, downtown guards - many of whom work in buildings owned by the mammoth Maguire Properties - are more inclined to fight than ever. They saw janitors, their high-rise building-mates, win a lucrative collective bargaining agreement in 2000. Back then, the most radical of the guards whispered to SEIU organizers, "What about us? When are you going to organize security?" ("The janitors, right now, are where we want to be," Edwards says.) And, at the same time, some security officers were hesitant to step forward, citing their companies' penchant for layoffs, and reassignment and firing as ways of cooling union activity.
Now, armed with SEIU's P.E.-fueled rhetoric, the more tangible support of Councilmember Jan Perry's "L.A. Safe and Secure" Initiative, and South L.A. church leaders, these workers appear emboldened. And, in a sense, they have a back-pocket chip to use in pressing for negotiations with building owners: Post-9/11 tensions keep security guards from being replaced by Mexican immigrants, as black janitors had been 30 years ago. Downtown business - not to mention Vicente Fox - might want to take note.
Edwards opened up to CityBeat for 10 minutes in a food court adjacent to his building, with a SEIU's flack hovering close by. If the guts of his story weren't so convincing it would be simple to find hyperbole in the slavery imagery crucial to the recruiting material's play. After all, Maguire and its security contractors did nothing to stop the talk. For the building owners' part, Maguire Properties, according to spokesperson Peggy Moretti, has a long-standing tradition of supporting organized unions. She says it opposes the SEIU effort because having janitors and security guards under the same union umbrella for such an agreement would "conflict with the Taft-Hartley law."
That rationale is well and good - and fairly transparent, too. It plays to the "Nation of Millions" paradigm that security guards are the last component of downtown high-rise employees to be granted the power of collective bargaining. After all, these officers, armed or without guns, are the man next to the man, i.e., the ones charged with protecting the moneymakers. How deep is that? Consider that at stake is the empowerment of these mostly black men who make way for the enrichment of The West. One might think downtown business inclined to take care of security.
Or, as Edwards posits, "If you have an unhappy guard, how safe are you?" Now that's good rhetoric.
The security guards, same as the janitors before them, are a time-strapped group hardly able to keep up with the drama of an AFL-CIO on the brink of demise. What they know - as one AFL-CIO fatalistically expressed it - is that the organization's been going downhill for 60 years; shit, how bad can it really get? They suspect Schwarzenegger's the devil and regard figures like Martin Ludlow and Mayor Villaraigosa as gifts from a deity. My sense is the William Edwardses of downtown experience the power and hope of a "Nation of Millions" by the most fragile kind of osmosis.
But this is not about me. Lord knows I've scrapped with enough security guards in my life. In this fight, I openly root for them. Never mind the thanklessness of their daily gigs, the contract SEIU is pushing for would - according to SEIU sources - bring upwards of $100 million to South Los Angeles, where so many of downtown's security officers reside. That number is a primary reason why church leaders and South L.A. political reps have signed on, as well as why the building owners downtown have opposed contract talks so adamantly. To fight for money is to fight for power.Published: 07/14/2005
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
