Outside a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, about 80 security guards and union reps gathered Wednesday in the rain to authorize a strike to demand better wages, adequate training and family health care from security companies that contract with major firms around the Bay Area.
“In Silicon Valley, where you have some of the biggest tech companies in the world, they do not have family medical benefits,” said David Huerta on Wednesday.
Huerta is the president of Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West, which represents security guards for a range of businesses, including buildings that house some of the Bay Area’s most profitable companies: Google, Open AI, Salesforce and Meta.
“The audacity of the security companies to tell us, a predominantly Black and Brown workforce — 43% Latino, 23% Black — that we should be grateful to have a job,” Huerta told ralliers.
Tejinder Singh, a security officer who works the graveyard shift guarding buildings at Google’s campus in Mountain View, said his team is chronically understaffed — presenting security issues for the company and for himself.
“They give us 10-15 buildings and one or two officers,” Singh said. Last week, he said, during a shift change, someone broke into a building and stole a laptop.
The workers know we’re in for a fight.
David Huerta, SEIU USWW president
Assemblymember Matt Haney and San Francisco supervisors Connie Chan and Rafael Mandelman joined the rally, offering remarks in support of the action.
Negotiations between union reps and companies like Allied Universal, Securitas Group and GardaWorld Security started in April.
Allied Universal wrote in a statement Thursday that they couldn’t comment on labor negotiations, but that they support their employees.
“We continue to closely monitor the situation and remain focused on maintaining safe and reliable operations,” the statement said.
Low pay, high risks
The union claimed that during negotiations, employers proposed a 25-cent hourly raise over the next four years, according to representatives from the union.
“It’s a mess,” said Baban Preed, a security guard at the San Jose Mineta International Airport. Preed helps keep traffic moving in the car drop-off zones outside terminals.
“Last year, I got a 95-cent raise,” Preed said. After three years working at the airport, he now makes about $30 an hour — far below average hourly wages for typical Bay Area private sector workers, according to a study on security jobs by UC Berkeley published in April.
The study also found that employee turnover for security personnel in the Bay Area is almost twice that of other private sector workers and that many are undertrained, finding themselves in dangerous situations they aren’t prepared for.
“Officers are often put in positions where they don’t have any choice but to do something more than observe and report,” said Stephen Boardman, a union representative. In 2024, a security guard employed by Allied Universal at a Walgreens in San Francisco went to the hospital after being stabbed by a customer.
The officer was subsequently fired by Allied Universal, which alleged he had been working outside of his job description when he confronted the knife-wielding individual, Boardman said.
“The workers know we’re in for a fight; the employers know we’re in for a fight,” said Huerta. After the rally, he said, they go back to the bargaining table — this time with the leverage of a possible strike.