Exactly two years ago, SEIU-USWW, the service workers union that represents janitors, security guards and others, organized a demonstration outside the Oakland Police Officers Association building, on Fifth Street, and demanded the immediate defunding of the Oakland Police Department. It was the heyday of the post George-Floyd anti-police movement. The union’s vice president, Sanjay Garla, called “on the city of Oakland to defund its police department,” Channel 4 News reported.
Garla demanded that a portion of OPD’s budget be redirected “in our communities…especially for our black members, our brown members, who are struggling to make ends meet.”
Fast forward to yesterday, June 14. Here is SEIU-USWW again, demonstrating on the streets of Oakland—this time, it’s Broadway. Their new demand: increased protection. According to CBS News, security guards who work in office buildings and public facilities downtown are being subjected to “violent robberies, being attacked by unhoused people when trying to clear them from an area, and violence and hostility.” According to SEIU spokesperson Steve Boardman, the union’s communications director, “[Security] officers have been attacked and assaulted and spit on,” he said, citing instances of security guards ending up in the hospital; one security guard was even killed.
At their protest yesterday, SEIU-USWW didn’t specifically call for increased police protection. Probably, they felt they couldn’t, in light of their previous demands to defund OPD. Instead, Boardman put the onus on employers. “We need increased accountability from our employers in terms of what is the plan when you are dealing with a violent situation? How are our security officers supposed to handle situations with homelessness, with mental illness?"
Good questions. One wonders, though, if the powers-that-be at SEIU have second thoughts about defunding the police. It can’t be fun to be on the night shift as a security guard or janitor downtown, when you’re walking dark streets at 3 a.m., hoping not to be attacked. If that were me, I’d wanted to see cops, maybe even National Guard troops, out there in uniform, knowing they were there to keep me safe.
SEIU’s position, in terms of shifting the burden of protection to employers, is incoherent. Boardman asks for employers “to take responsibility through hazard pay and providing de-escalation training to deal with violent situations.” But when you think about it, hazard pay—pleasant as it may be--will do nothing to prevent a guard or janitor from being attacked. And how is “de-escalation training” supposed to help a janitor as she’s accosted by a drug-addled crazy at 2 a.m.?
I feel for the SEIU employees, I really do. I would not walk down Broadway after midnight, that’s for sure. But I don’t have to; they do, in order to keep their jobs and receive a paycheck. Isn’t it sad that SEIU has locked itself so tightly into an anti-police stance that they can’t even admit an increased police presence downtown is really what they need?
Steve Heimoff