The Service Employees International Union is looking to organize more than 70,000 office-building security guards nationwide this summer, a group that in many cities is more than 50 percent African-American. Those cities include Los Angeles, where, the service employees say, guards' pay averages $8.50 an hour, or about $17,700 a year for a 40-hour week. The city's black clerics are rallying behind the unionization drive, which has borrowed the vocabulary and history of the civil rights movement.
See "Borrowing Language of Civil Rights Movement, Drive Is On to Unionize Guards", Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, July 25, 2006