The Victorious Opposition

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Anyway, the group I have been working with specializes in providing security services for hip-hop clubs and events.  Sounds wonderful, eh?  The secret is that most of the guys carry Tasers (no, I don’t have one) and they’ve proven to be the best thing that ever happened for crowd control since the development of canister rounds for mobile artillery.  Nevertheless, things get completely out of control nearly every week.  I hate doing the special events because there is no dress code and we have only so much control over who can and cannot come in. 

Dress codes that specifically ban types of gang apparel are important, because the gangbangers can tell who they are supposed to be fighting with based on the colors of clothing, the particular sports team logos, and the way the clothes are worn (hat turned at a particular angle, etc).  You don’t let anyone wear the uniform, they can’t figure out who to fight with.  It makes all the difference in the world, believe me.

Luckily, we started working a nightclub a couple of months ago.  I prefer it because they do have a dress code and the hours are generally more stable.  We have had only a little bit of trouble from gang violence on the outside of the club; a month ago, we prevented a large, potentially deadly brawl from breaking out at the front door when we saw one group of bangers approaching and intercepted them before they crossed the street and then a car got shot up nearby while a police captain was visiting.  Nobody was hurt but after that happened, the police became super-aggressive about shutting the establishment down. 

We got raided twice in three weeks because they were looking for intoxicated minors and—idiotically—the club owners never bothered to get the proper licensing to operate.  Remarkably, they kept opening up after both raids and this only pissed off the police even more.  We were stuck in the middle and when the police came in to raid both times, a high-ranking officer would take our security licenses and lecture us for an hour or so about how corrupt the club owners were and how they wanted it shut down because it’s such a nuisance.  We didn’t want to hear it because all of us work there part time and need the extra cash. As long as they had our licenses, we couldn’t leave, meaning we were effectively detained.  This is an especially embarrassing and annoying situation for a self-described security professional.  One of the strange aspects of working as a nightclub security guard in this city is that you might want to be friends with the police so that they’ll be there when you really need them but you can’t be friends because they are often out to shut down your job site and take money out of your pocket.  Police departments in this area are remarkably hostile to any sort of nightlife, particularly where large numbers of black folks are concerned.  The club owners do have their shady backgrounds and associations, but they also pay me money I use on groceries.  Who do you think I’m more sympathetic to?

For the past two weeks, since the last raid, the club continued operating.  Still without a license but keeping a low profile.  Since they weren’t promoting as much or drawing a very large crowd, they didn’t need us.  I hated doing without the money and when my boss called me on Friday to ask me to work there the next night, I quickly agreed.  On a normal night, they have ask for four of us but they only wanted two.  I really wasn’t concerned, mostly because we have a good rapport with the patrons, the thugs know that we’re more aggressive than they are, and my partner, who we’ll call “Jeff” was a two-tour Iraq War cavalry vet who is close to getting a job with a law enforcement agency.  No worries.

What I was worried about was the police, and when I met the owner at the door, I asked about his business/event licensing.  He said that he would have it on Monday but was running anyway because “the cops usually come on Fridays” and he thought he’d be in the clear.  Well, everything was fine; for the first two hours, that is.  Just after Midnight, the owner asked my partner to move his car down the street and for us to meet him a block away.  I walked with him and we all met up a comfortable distance from the club.  From there, I saw why he wanted to get away:  the cops were raiding the place again and they were probably looking for him. 

The owner paid our fee in cash for the night and told us we could go.  My partner gave him a ride out of the area while I had to walk back onto the parking lot to get my car and get the hell out of there. What I saw as soon as I set foot in the parking lot was complete pandemonium.  The police had thoroughly riled up the crowd (about 200 people), who were pissed that they had paid $10 for less than two hours of partying.  A fight between two guys broke out right in front of me and what irritated me most about it was that I just wanted to get away from there before the police saw me and started asking questions about the owner.  On the other hand, a major fight on the lot would keep me from getting out and make things worse for the club.  I pulled out my flashlight and pepper spray, shined a light on the combatants, and yelled at them to “stop it” and get off the parking lot.  Incredibly, they did stop and everyone ran away without me having to do anything else.  That was a first.

The police were still dealing with something on the other side of the club so I made it to my car.  There was no way out of the parking lot which was choked with cars and pedestrians and there was a traffic jam on the street.  During closing, we have a good system for clearing the parking lot and directing traffic out of the surrounding areas but obviously hadn’t been prepared thanks to the police department’s blitzkrieg tactics. 

“Fuck it, they can deal with it,” I thought, and that’s when I noticed that some of the officers were even walking around with assault rifles like they were reoccupying Sadr City.  Since I was stuck, I squatted down by my car’s engine block (being concerned about the possibility from gunfire from both the pissed-off bangers and the overly-intense and possibly jumpy policemen.) and called my boss to let him know that everything had gone to hell yet again thanks to the club owner’s inability to understand that the police want to shut him down and are going to keep trying until they win.  I told my employer that I was going to bring the cash to him at the special event he was working in another part of the city. Eventually, it cleared enough that I was able to slip out.

First, I met up with Jeff at a nearby gas station, only a few blocks from the club.  He had dropped the owner off at a convenience store across the street from where we were and he found a ride home from there.  The parking lot of that convenience store has the misfortune of being the location where all of our club patrons meet and hang out after the establishment closes (or is shut down) each night.  The police who deal with our club can’t do anything about it because it’s in a different city and that city’s police never seem to do anything about it.  Because Jeff had nothing better to do, he said he would follow me out to the special event and see what was going on.

We had pulled out of the parking lot and I was just about to turn left, onto a street that would lead me to a freeway ramp next to convenience store parking lot where 200 of the club’s patrons were gathered, when I heard four or five gunshots ring out from behind the convenience store that sent the crowd running.  Instead of turning, I straightened the wheel and stomped on the accelerator.  Jeff, oddly, did make the turn even though he heard the gunfire (after dealing with Iranian-made IED’s, I suppose that small caliber handguns aren’t a big deal).

When we arrived at the special event, I handed the cash over to my boss and provided all of the details about the enormous clusterfuck I’d been party to all night.  He was a little bothered that we had helped the club owner evade the police (he had already gotten away, Jeff just took him out of the area) and avoided them but when I explained that the police had pretty much eroded my sense of private-public sector cooperation as far as that establishment is concerned, that keeping the client “out of trouble” is sensible and desirable, and that we had done nothing illegal and I didn’t feel like being detained for an hour over nothing, he let it be.  Regrettably, he asked both of us to stay at the special event and help out.  This sucked because we had gotten paid for a full four hours and sent home after two hours.  I had been ahead but now was actually going to have to work for my wage.

As is normal with these events, it didn’t take long before they started fighting inside.  Jeff and my boss charged in to handle it while I stayed outside to keep the doorway clear and prevent anyone from coming inside.  I’m the oldest one who works for that company (even counting the owner of the company) and I tend to avoid the drama whenever I can.  During the melee, my boss Tasered a guy and was trying to cuff him when someone ran up and hit him in the head.  My boss was “seeing stars” as he described it afterward, but finished up and pulled the guy out, never figuring out who hit him.  It left a knot on his head and everything. Jeff pepper-sprayed some people inside of the club—which is frowned upon my our policy—and ended up spraying a girl who had the bad luck to walk right through of the stream.  I didn’t see it happen, but she walked out with a friend who managed to avoid the stream and stood next to me.  Well, at that point, the event promoter pulled the plug and everyone started leaving.

Surprisingly, everybody left without further violence and I stayed with the poor girl who had been sprayed until almost everyone was out.  Her friend wasn’t very sympathetic.

“Renee, I been pepper sprayed before.  You need to open your eyes, girl!”

Renee couldn’t do it.  I think that her friend had never taken a direct shot like that before.  Since the crowd was dispersing and the cars were leaving, I took the girls to the restroom and decided to help treat the pepper spray.  The girl’s friend was awful.  She brought in a bottle of water, held Renee’s head in a headlock, and started just pouring water all over her face like she was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  Renee, naturally, started panicking and I had to save her from her friend.

Useful shit to know: the best way to deal with pepper spray is to scrub your eyes with no-tears baby shampoo and rinse with cold water.  You should be able to get your eyes open in less than five minutes (or you can do nothing and be blind for 45 minutes).  Because most pepper spray is water-based, any of the oil on your skin will reactivate the burning sensation when you take a shower, even if you thought it had worn off.  To remove pepper spray from your skin, wash with dishwashing soap as it will cut through the oil. 

If you don’t have baby shampoo readily available, wet a paper towel and press it against your eyelids—but do NOT rub—then lift the paper towel off, throw it away, and repeat with another wet paper towel.  After the second wet towel, press a dry paper towel on your eyelids, hold it for a few seconds, and lift it off.  This pulls the oil off your face that causes the burning.  Repeat the “wet towel/dry towel” treatment until your eyes stay open.  If you don’t have any paper towels around, pour lots of water on your face or dunk your head underwater while holding your eyes open.  If you don’t have access to any water, well, it sucks to be you.

Unfortunately, we had no baby shampoo handy.  I have been meaning to bring one of Thrilla’s old bottles and keeping it in my bag for these occasions but keep forgetting.  It took about fifteen minutes of wet/dry towel to get her eyes open.  During that time, another young lady ran into the restroom and we were treated to the sound of her hurling in a toilet for several minutes. I only treated the girl who got hit with the pepper spray because she really shouldn’t have gotten sprayed in the first place and I felt bad for her.  If it had been somebody we meant to blind, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.  When she said she was fine, I suggested she go home and shower with dishwashing soap and left.

I got home and, as usual on the crazy nights, was so wired that I couldn’t get to sleep until dawn.

The moral of the story?  I’ve got nothing.  The shit was fun when I was 23 but at 32, I wish I could just get a respectable full time day job in an office.  I hate this recession for the awful things some of us have to do to get by.  I hate taking these ridiculous risks for these wages and putting up with the general jackassery of nightlife.  The only reason I am doing it is because they pay cash.  Until I get a real job, I can look forward to more of the same.

May your own choices be better than mine during these hard times.

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Oh, please.  We don’t have a “black” president now.  White mother, African father and raised in Hawaii by white grandparents.  I have more understanding of the Black experience in America than he or you ever will.  He’s a complete phony and only of value to people like you because of the sheer amounts of the people’s tax money that he’s willing to throw at organized labor.

You union fools have completely destroyed the automotive industry and so increased the costs of doing business in the United States that we have no manufacturing base left. 

If you goons cared more about actually doing your jobs rather than getting fat as your employers fall into bankruptcy, this country would be better off.  Unions hurt workers, they hurt their industries, and they hurt America and everybody knows it, which is why union membership has been in irreversible decline for decades and why this little scheme of yours to unionize private security isn’t going to happen.

Here’s how stupid your plan is: even IF any guards don’t show up for work (HA!), the officer that was supposed to be relieved by one of your union wannabes would be stuck at work.  A supervisor would have to call in another guard, who would probably be happy to have the overtime, but would still be inconvenienced.  Like I said, unions hurt workers.

We don’t want your union.  There are other ways to improve the shortcomings of our industry without bullshit, corrupt, failed organized labor plots.

I hit him on the stuff I knew would get him riled.  Like the military and law enforcement, private security tends to be more politically-conservative while union leaders are nearly always reliable Democrats.  It really does show how out of touch these guys are that they celebrate Obama in order to make their case.

He blasted back at me for daring question the UAW:

Union Buster…, please educate yourself!!!!

Much is said about poor management in the Big Three, but less is said about the short-term focus on quarterly profits that characterized their corporate culture. As we recall, the U.S. automakers paid out bonuses of several hundred MILLIONS of dollars to each of its executives when profits were in the billions, so perhaps we should note that the focus on short-term profits might not have been limited to the best interest of long term survival.

Maybe we should examine whether the short-term focus on quarterly profits that was certainly part of the Big Three’s demise is itself bankrupt. Maybe this corporate philosophy is leading American industry to the junk heap because it creates all the wrong incentives and disincentives: an obsession with profits rather than quality, a dearth of long-term planning, a pressure to pay out bonuses and dividends rather than pay down debt and all the rest.

Most of the profits generated by the Big Three in North America came not from manufacturing vehicles but from financing the sale of those vehicles.In other words, the auto industry securitized its way to “prosperity” just like the investment banking and housing industries.

When you no longer can make a profit manufacturing a product, then you focus on the profits and fees generated by selling debt to consumers to buy the product. Is this anyone’s conception of a healthy robust sustainable capitalism?

In our view, this incident sums up why the Big Three are collapsing: poor quality, poor customer service, and a high cost of ownership. It’s simply too expensive to buy and own a Big Three car unless you sell it at a hugely depreciated price within the warranty period—at which point you’ve already lost thousands of dollars.

There are basic explanations for this decline in durability. One is that the Big Three relentlessly squeezed their parts suppliers to lower costs, and since that’s all that mattered then the quality of those parts declined—you get what you pay for.

Poor parts lead to parts failures and durability vanishes.

Unfortunately for Detroit, real (inflation-adjusted) U.S. household income began slipping in 1970 and has continued sliding ever since. As interest rates climbed in the 70s and the quality of Detroit’s vehicles visibly slipped, people turned to the Japanese cars partly because they could no longer afford to buy an American car every three years or maintain one that fell apart in a few years.

SEWU

Interesting point of view.  I never heard that before, but the problems of the automakers aren’t all caused by cheap parts:

You cannot be for real!  I’m sure that GM being held hostage by the UAW to the point that forklift operators are being paid six-figure incomes and absolutely cannot be laid off while auto dealers are being fired in the hundreds had nothing to do with it, right?  Seriously, reading your comments about the executives is the most blatant case of blaming the victim I ever saw.

I notice that Toyota and Honda cars built in the US by non-union workers run great for the cost and are certainly a smarter buy than the junk being put together by spoiled UAW workers.  I’m sure you have an answer for that.  Unions have turned great American businesses into nothing more than lifetime health insurance providers who are forced to put building great products second.  This is why I only buy foreign cars.

So now what you want to do is unionize security guards and bestow obscene wages and entitlements on unskilled workers so that we can have the same bureaucratic strangulation and corruption that kills every other business or organization that is cursed with unions in the US.  This will kill jobs by destroying the smaller companies that cannot afford to pay health insurance and encourage clients of the larger companies to do without security because of the exaggerated, artificial costs that come with unions.  You’re not out to improve the lot of security officers, but to enrich yourself with their dues.  It is so obvious that what you plan to do is harmful to the security profession and ultimately, the guards, that I cannot draw any other conclusion but that you are maliciously greedy.

Hey, next time you feel the need to put up a Craigslist ad, why don’t you take the time to explain why it is that DoL is suing your asses for violating the Landrum-Griffin Act?  What happened, did they find out you have Pauley Walnuts running things over there?  I hope you realize that it’s a little hard to claim that you represent the best interests of the security industry when you’re being litigated by the US Government under a law designed to combat organized crime in union activity.

Yes, I had done a little quick research and found out about the DoL suit.  Here’s some fun info on Landrum-Griffin.  He didn’t like that:

95% of licensed security officers across this country earn less than $9.00 per hour. This is the year 2009 and no hard worker should every be paid less than living wages. Our very own government,  “Your President” has endorsed the efforts of increasing unions and you feel he too must be wrong because of course he’s only the the most powerful man of this planet!!!!

If we are just UNSKILLED WORKERS what do you care if ALL 1 MILLION of us take a day off???  As you indicated we’re not that important to the safety of this country.  So just sit back and observe what ONE MILLION UNSKILLED WORKERS can do to change this warped mentality of the average corporate greed companies!!

On your comment on our litigation.., remember this great country allows everyone the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. Until any court of law has proven we have violated any laws, we are just as innocent as you are!!!!!!!

SEWU

I decided to keep hammering:

Oh, I didn’t say you were guilty of anything.  I just think it’s mighty interesting that a group who is being pursued by the federal government under an anti-organized crime statute is also trying to schedule a day that no security officers show up for work, creating an excellent day of opportunity for criminals.  People can draw their own conclusions, I guess.

On to unskilled workers:

Unskilled workers does not mean the same thing as “unnecessary workers”.  I don’t know about you, but I have worked as a security officer for as little as $7.50/hr.  This was ten years ago.  I could have made more money doing other things, but I stuck around because I enjoyed the work and took pride in it; not because I felt like the world owed me a gold-brick lump of shit.

More importantly, I understood that I was unskilled.  To work as a guard in my area, you don’t need special training or any long apprenticeships or really any more than a clean criminal record (I’m not sure if violating provisions of the Landrum-Griffin Act counts or not).  Eventually, I decided that I did want to make more money and have good benefits.  The difference between you and me is that I wasn’t going to extort those out of my boss with collective bargaining.  I paid to put myself through college and I received two professional certifications, including the highly-respected CPP.  I took advantage of training opportunities offered by my employers and sometimes paid for training to better myself.  You see, I developed job skills so that I was no longer unskilled and could simply work jobs that paid more.  What a concept, right?

Now what really horrifies me about you union bosses is that you know how to put other people’s money in your pockets really well, but you either don’t understand economics or you don’t care.  If we had done it your way nine years ago when I was working for a company that provided armed and unarmed guards for nightclubs and we voted to become unionized, my boss would suddenly have to pay each guard, let’s say, $15.00 plus $2.00 in all sorts of benefits.  At the time, he was only charging $18/hr for each guard. 

Well, the boss is going to have to start charging more so that he makes profit, so one of two things is going to happen.  Either the nightclub owner is going to have to raise prices on his patrons to continue affording the same number of guards or he is going to have to have fewer guards working.  In the first case, fewer people want to come to the club because it’s now too expensive and we end up having to cut back on guards, meaning that someone is out of a job.  If the club owner decides to get rid of some guards, we now have guards without jobs and we no longer have enough guards to adequately protect the nightclub—meaning that the danger has increased for the guards.  You wouldn’t be helping us. 

People who work in security do so for many reasons.  Either they are retired and want to stay busy, or they are college students who like the hours, or they are planning to enter police work or go work for the investigative arm of the Department of Labor, or they are working part-time for extra cash.  The one thing that they all have in common is that they agreed to do the job for the offered wage!  Keep in mind that nobody is forcing them to do the job.  They could decide to go work for GM and make $100,000/yr driving a forklift; nobody is stopping them, right?  You may think wages are unacceptably low, but if that were really true, nobody would take these jobs and employers would raise wages in order to get workers.  That’s how it works.

When you try to gain the system by pretending that unskilled workers are entitled to huge incomes, you make the economy worse in every way.  In order to pay higher union wages, businesses must raise prices on consumers—which includes union members.  Rising prices cause inflation, our money declines in value, and then you people do what?  You start demanding higher wages still, causing the cycle to repeat again!

Do not go forward with this plan to unionize security guards.  What they need is better training, education, and hiring standards.  Organized labor is not the way to deliver this.

At that point, he broke it off:

(Thrill):

Your replies have been very entertaining to read, but useless to our cause! We need to protect the underpaid ONE MILLION WORKERS that have made MILLIONS in profit for guard companies and have never been fairly compensated for their work. We now start collecting the fair wages for ALL security officers.

Security Officer Exploitation ends on JUNE 15, 2009.

Thank You for your concerns

SEWU

Now, I can tell you from firsthand experience that contract security guard wages are low, but it’s mostly because most business clients treat security as an afterthought and only have a presence in order to lower their insurance premiums.  They go for the lowest bidder.  Still, people take those security positions because the alternative is some other McJob.  The key to getting ahead in this business, like any other, is education, not extortion.  For now, anyway.

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