14,000 Security Guards for Major Tech Companies Plan to Strike
Security workers guarding some of the biggest names in the tech industry said they will strike starting Friday.
The strike comes after months of negotiations over fair wages and improved benefits with 15 private-security contractors and employers, during which the union has called attention to the disparity between compensation for guards and the vast wealth that they protect.
A press release for the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West, which represents some of the security guards, states they will strike after “bad faith bargaining, surveillance of officers, retaliatory discipline, making unilateral changes, illegally coercing, restraining, and interfering with officers’ right to strike, and other unfair practices on the job as they fight for a fair contract.”
Allied Universal said that they “do not comment on ongoing labor negotiations.” Securitas did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.
The offer on the bargaining table is a 65-cent raise over the next two years, according to the press release — guards currently make a median hourly wage of $20.09, according to a UC Berkeley study.
“We’re looking for a path for $30 [an hour] for all officers,” said Stephen Boardman, a spokesperson for the SEIU-USWW.
Jerry Longoria, a security guard with Allied Universal, said he has gone through five contract negotiations in his 25 years as a security guard.
“This contract is so bad,” Longoria said. “We are going to fight for what we deserve.”
Longaria recalled working as a security guard for jewelry brand Cartier, where he watched a woman walk up to the counter and buy a $1.5 million necklace.
“If people got that kind of money, and they wanna pay us pennies, that’s unfair, that’s mistreatment,” Longoria said. “I live in an SRO. I don’t even have a bathroom or a kitchen.”
Longoria said that he cannot find a new place to live due to high rents across the city, adding: “I’m ready to go on strike.”
The security officers marched through downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, passing by the Dreamforce Conference, an annual tech gathering hosted by software giant Salesforce. Many tech employees, as well as leaders of the companies that the security guards protect, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, will attend Dreamforce.
Jane Martin, an organizer with the activist group Bay Resistance, joined the security workers on Tuesday, holding signs with slogans like “Keep families together,” “Good jobs to security officers” and “No ICE, no fear.”
“The Salesforce logo is a cloud, and the name of the conference is Dreamforce, so we wrote our own hopes and dreams into the cloud signs,” Martin said.
KQED’s Jose Velazquez contributed to this report.