From the Los Angeles Times
STEVE LOPEZ POINTS WEST
$8.50 an Hour Buys a Bleak Existence
Steve Lopez
Points West
April 9, 2006
In the seediest part of
downtown Los Angeles we walk through a grim hotel lobby, go past armed
guards and locked gates, ride the creaky elevator to the fourth floor
and step into the only home Juanita Burroughs, a full-time security
guard for 18 years, can afford.
The
50-year-old grandmother opens the door to her one-room, $315-a-month
place on 7th Street near San Pedro and we squeeze in together.
I've been in bigger walk-in closets and nicer prison cells, and that's no exaggeration.
"I
do what I can with it," Burroughs says, sitting on a bed that takes up
half the room. I take the only chair and our knees are almost touching.
Artificial
flowers are strung along the flesh-colored walls and teddy bears
compete for space on the bed. There's no closet or dresser and her
uniforms hang on a hook, badge No. 2333 pinned to a pocket. The cost of
the uniforms is taken out of her check.
This is the life $8.50
an hour — with no vacation, health benefits or sick leave — buys you in
Southern California, where the middle class is shrinking toward
invisibility as the service economy pushes thousands to the edge of the
cliff.
"When I first came here and saw this room, all I could do was just cry," sighs Burroughs.
But
she couldn't afford anything else. The divorced mother of four had
stayed for a time with her sons and other relatives, but none of them
were in good enough shape to help her out for long, she says, and she
didn't want to add to their burdens.
Why stick with a low-end job like security guard? Because
she didn't finish high school, so her options are limited, and the pay
in other service jobs isn't much better. For a while she lived in her
car, but it got towed one day and she couldn't afford the impound fees.
That landed her on the streets for a year, taking meals at downtown
missions.
Now she's in this claustrophobic room, feeling only
slightly more optimistic. She gets up at dawn to beat the lines for the
shower in the shared bathroom down the hall.
"An awful lot of
people are barely scraping by in a place with a great deal of wealth,"
said Dan Flaming of the Economic Roundtable. "I think it's fragile and
precarious for us as a region to have such deep polarization between
those who are skilled and educated and comfortable and those who are
desperate."
So how will Burroughs and others like her ever escape the squalor?
We
can simply decide that an honest day's work ought to afford a person
some basic dignity, and legislate a living wage. But the mere mention
of such an idea works the ruling class into a lather and paralyzes
politicians. So Burroughs is taking a different gamble.
For the
last year, she's been going to meetings and rallies staged by Service
Employees International Union Local 1877, which has been trying for
three years to organize thousands of security guards.
I first
met Burroughs on Tuesday morning as she marched in a steady rain with a
few hundred colleagues. At one point she took the microphone outside
Macy's on 7th and said she hadn't had a vacation in years and was tired
of living in poverty.
Her job at Bank of America Plaza, she
later told me, is to inspect the trunks of cars that enter the parking
lot. In a post-9/11 era, she can potentially save lives as well as
protect the offices of multibillion-dollar companies.
So
shouldn't that be worth more than $8.50 — a wage that leads to high
turnover and lots of inexperienced guards looking for explosives?
Robert Maguire, who owns several high-rise properties in downtown L.A., thinks so.
In his buildings, he requires guard service contractors to pay their
employees a minimum of $10 per hour, plus health benefits. "I think
people don't calculate the cost of turnover, and it's very high," he
said.
He thinks higher wages make economic sense. "You can't
have people that are disenfranchised if you're trying to get quality
and productivity, and we think … it is absolutely justified."
Other building owners haven't stepped up, though. And even Maguire is
skeptical about bringing in Local 1877. He and other owners point out
that SEIU represents janitors, and they'd rather not have the same
union involved with guards because a walkout by one could be honored by
the other.
That's a flimsy argument, if you ask me, and
something that could be avoided in negotiations. It hasn't been a
hindrance in other cities, says SEIU official Jono Shaffer.
"Owners
are resistant," says Victor Narro of UCLA's Downtown Labor Center,
"because they see how effective SEIU has been with janitorial workers.
But this is a very responsible union that doesn't just strike without
trying to work out relationships with owners."
Speaking of
janitors, there's an irony here. Several decades ago, janitorial jobs
were unionized and largely African American in Los Angeles. Employees
made middle-class wages. But the union was busted by owners and
contractors who hired cheaper immigrant labor, some of it illegal,
squeezing many African Americans into lower-paying jobs. What kind of
jobs? Security.
An estimated 60% of the downtown security guards
are African American, as is Burroughs. She knows she'll never find easy
street as a security guard. But a bump to, say, $10 or $11 an hour,
with health benefits, could get her out of the one-room trap and put
her into something where she can at least cook, cutting back on her
food costs.
"I don't even have my grandchildren in here,"
Burroughs says as she flips through a family photo album. "I don't want
them to see Granny living this way."
She takes me back down in the elevator and a friend asks how she's doing.
"I'm blessed," Burroughs says.
"Blessed?" I ask.
She's alive, she tells me, with a roof over her head. I say goodbye and head out to the streets where she once lived.
Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at http://www.latimes.com/lopez