Can it bring the guards up?

EVERY OFFICE HAS its uniformed caretakers who arrive long before we do and stay long after we’ve gone. Yet most people have far more affinity for the office janitor than for the building security guard.

It’s a question of narrative -- whose story resonates more with the public. Immigrant janitors are looking for entry-level jobs to give them a boost into a better life. Black security guards are often working jobs of last resort, jobs they see as painful evidence of an almost permanent failure of poor blacks to attain a better life in their native country.

The first story wins by a landslide. The pro-immigrants rights movement has excited intense popular interest, while the issue of black displacement goes practically unnoticed.

Trying to change the story’s dynamic is the Stand for Security Coalition, a group of religious and community leaders that has been trying to help unionize low-paid security guards in the L.A. area for the last three years. The coalition recently held a prayer breakfast at Bethel AME Church, a bright and prosperous looking structure in an otherwise distressed South L.A. neighborhood. I’m not inclined to prayer, but I went to the breakfast because it was for a worthy cause.

In an airy room at Bethel were six tables covered with white cloths and centerpieces. Not quite two were full.

Bethel’s pastor, Lewis Logan II, a chief architect of the coalition, assured the crowd that the turnout was hardly indicative of the state of the campaign to organize security guards with the Service Employees International Union, which had such success with janitors 10 years ago. He said that momentum was building and that victory was close.

But a certain frustration bled through as Logan described how commercial building owners are giving the security guards less respect than they gave the janitors a decade ago. Owners want to exclude guards working in smaller buildings from joining the union, for instance, and they want moratoriums on future organizing. As the four-year security guard campaign wears on with almost none of the cachet of other low-wage, service-sector campaigns that were heavily immigrant and Latino -- not just janitors but parking lot attendants, homecare workers, hotel workers -- the racial indignation over the disparity grows.

“We’re no longer chattel property of this country,” said the Rev. William Campbell, president of the Los Angeles Council of Churches. “We’re the beneficiaries of slave history, of activists like Harriet Tubman. This is our leg in the race. We can’t drop the baton.”

That may be a bit dramatic. Yet so is the difference between the fortunes of the security guards and other low-paid workers who’ve agitated for -- and won -- union rights.

Part of the problem is timing. This is a different political and economic moment from 10 years ago; it is a meaner, less gentle post-9/11 era, a time in which everybody wants more security but nobody wants to pay much for it. Of course, unions have weakened further in the last decade, and the AFL-CIO has split philosophically.

Still, the racial question remains. The security guard campaign is one of the most ambitious attempts in U.S. history to organize black workers. The SEIU is shooting for 200,000 guards nationwide, 6,000 in L.A. But the local power brokers are unimpressed.

The Building Owners and Managers Assn. eventually supported the janitors but has resisted the guards. The association recently claimed that the Stand for Security Coalition is impeding negotiations by acting independently of the SEIU and creating confusion about who stands for whom.

Yet 10 years ago, Justice for Janitors was the darling of the progressive movement. It drew support from many different quarters -- including then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa -- that helped to ensure success in the end.

Logan and others, including the Rev. Eric Lee, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, are plotting a series of actions and protests to wind up the year. (One of the best things about the campaign is the synergy it’s created among black community leaders who normally work alone.) But the success of the campaign may well depend on believers like 55-year-old Ron Reese, a former security guard who is now an SEIU organizer.

Reese’s faith in big change is infectious. “Black people have got to be more economically intelligent,” he said. “This campaign will go a long ways toward accomplishing that.”