The guards don't get paid when they're sick. Not one day, no matter how beloved, respected and entrenched they are in the Temple community.
Berry has worked full-time in Temple's Tuttleman Building, on the main campus, for the last six of his 16 years with AlliedBarton.
"The students are like my own children," says Berry, a dad and granddad. "A lot of them come to me for advice when they're homesick or stressed. I encourage them to hang in there."
He's proud that there is no trouble in Tuttleman, which teems with students.
"Not one incident has happened in my building in four years," he says. "I know who belongs here and who doesn't."
He earns $9.15 per hour, except if he calls in sick, in which case he's docked a day's wages.
An AlliedBarton spokesman says employees may use vacation time to cover sick days, but Berry contends that's not the case. "You have to give notice to use vacation days," he says. "If you don't know you're going to be sick, how can you do that?"
Berry's predicament is common for many of the 16,000 AlliedBarton security guards based in Philly. That's why the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) targeted the company during the years it tried to organize Philly's private security guards. Those guards are mostly AlliedBarton employees, as the company has an 80 percent share of the city's market.
But last year, SEIU abandoned organizing Philly's guards. A source familiar with the pullback says SEIU agreed to disband its Philly campaign if AlliedBarton wouldn't fight SEIU's organizing guards in cities where the company doesn't enjoy the monopoly it does here.
Neither SEIU nor AlliedBarton would comment on the allegation, but Thomas Robinson has a lot to say about it.
"It really set us back," says Robinson, an AlliedBarton guard at the University of Pennsylvania who, after SEIU fled, helped guards there finally get up to three sick days per year. "It damaged my credibility with the guards I'd been working with."
