The Working Poor Security Guards Who Protect Everyone Else’s Safety

Last July, a gunman walked into the National Football League’s headquarters in New York and opened fire. Four people died. One of them was a security guard, unarmed, doing the job that put him between a shooter and everyone else in the building. It’s the kind of moment the rest of us almost never see, and exactly the kind these workers are increasingly expected to handle. The trouble is that almost nothing about how they’re paid, trained or treated reflects that expectation.

That mismatch is the subject of a new analysis from the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center, which set out to describe, in unglamorous statistical detail, who actually does this work in California. The answer is roughly 186,000 people, and a striking share of them are poor.

Security guards are everywhere once you start looking. They stand in hospital lobbies and at construction-site gates, in shopping centres and office towers and private schools, an enormous workforce that generates some $22.7 billion a year nationally for unarmed guard services alone. During the pandemic, California formally classified them as essential. And yet the Berkeley figures, drawn from American Community Survey data pooled across 2019 to 2023, sketch a job that pays like an afterthought: a median wage of just over $20 an hour, against $28.16 for the state’s workers generally. The lowest-paid quarter of guards take home $14.87 an hour or less.

Run those numbers against the cost of actually living in California and the picture sharpens. More than four in five guards, 81.3 per cent, earn below the MIT Living Wage for their region.

Poverty in the places with the highest wages

The geography produces one counterintuitive result. You might assume guards in the wealthy Bay Area are the comfortable ones. In raw dollars they earn the most, a median of $23.97 an hour. But because they are measured against neighbours pulling down a median of $42.71, fully 68.3 per cent of them count as low-wage, a far higher share than in Los Angeles or the state at large. Affluence, in other words, doesn’t lift these workers so much as leave them further behind.

“These are hard jobs, they’re risky jobs, and the pay does not compensate for that risk,” says Enrique Lopezlira, the UC Berkeley economist who led the report and directs the Labor Center’s Low-Wage Work Program. “So the folks who are willing to do these jobs are usually marginalized workers who need work to provide for themselves and their families.”

Those workers are, overwhelmingly, people of colour. Statewide, Latino workers make up 41.4 per cent of guards and Black workers another 23.1 per cent, while white workers account for one in five. Nearly 22 per cent were born abroad, a figure that climbs toward 30 per cent in the Bay Area, which raises a practical question the report flags about whether training and safety information even reaches workers in a language they read fluently. Among the lowest-paid guards the skew is sharper still: 45.9 per cent Latino, and a median age of just 32. There is also a tail of older workers, nearly 8 per cent over 65, holding down a physically punishing job well past the age most people hope to have left it behind. The pattern, Lopezlira says, reflects “the occupational segregation we see in low-wage industries.” It compounds, too: people in precarious work, he notes, “are less likely to speak up about their rights and to fight for fair pay and fair treatment,” which employers can exploit.

Then there is health insurance, or the lack of it. Despite four in five guards working full time, only 54.4 per cent get coverage through an employer or union; among the low-wage tier that drops to 44.7 per cent. Full-time work, no insurance. It is an oddly twentieth-century kind of precarity.

What turnover does to a security desk

The most alarming numbers concern churn. In 2024, annual turnover in California’s investigation-and-security sector ran at 91.6 per cent; in Los Angeles it hit 92.8, and the Bay Area, while lower in absolute terms at 87.4 per cent, showed the widest gap of all from its surrounding labour market. Meanwhile turnover across the broader private sector has been falling. So a chasm has opened up: a workforce we ask to provide continuity and institutional memory is, in practice, almost entirely replaced every year.

Does that actually degrade safety, or is it just a labour-market curiosity? Here the report reaches for an older piece of evidence that is hard to wave away. When San Francisco International Airport raised screener wages from $6.45 to $10 an hour under a living-wage policy, turnover among those screeners collapsed from 94.7 per cent to 18.7. And researchers found something more pointed still: the rate at which screeners caught security breaches fell measurably with every uptick in turnover. Pay people properly and they stay; when they stay, they get better at the actual job of catching things.

That is the thread Lopezlira keeps pulling. The report lands as unions representing California guards sit in contract talks, and as the state legislature weighs a measure to mandate better training, which at present is, in the authors’ words, “highly uneven … and often minimal relative to the quasi-policing functions that guards are expected to perform.” His argument is not really a plea for sympathy. It is closer to a warning about systems. “When a workforce that is responsible for safety is underpaid, undertrained and experiencing high turnover,” he says, “that has real implications for the quality and consistency of security services in the state.”

Which leaves a question worth sitting with the next time you walk past one of these uniforms without a glance. We have built a great deal of our everyday safety on the shoulders of people we pay too little to keep, and ask, with no real training, to stand where the danger is. The NFL officer who died last July was, by every measure in this report, typical of his profession. Whether the next conflict on the next lobby floor ends better may depend less on heroics than on a pay stub.

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