Photos from the Coastline Security Strike of 1980

In 1978, while attending Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, I worked part-time for a company called Coastline Security.

It was the shittiest employer anywhere - all the employees agreed. And so after a few months of abuse, I ended up being delegated to call a union for help - the International Union of Security Officers.

By default, I ended up leading the employees in unionizing.

After a hard fight, we won our NLRB election in late 1979. The company promptly responded by firing me for union activity.

The union found me a job with another union security company, and then hired me to work part-time as a union rep with the Coastline employees in their contract negotiations.

After a year of fruitless negotiations, the Coastline employees voted to go on strike in late 1980. The union hired me full-time to coordinate that strike - my first full-time paid union job.

On December 17, 1980, we started a rolling strike against Coastline. The first place we struck was the site at Lonestar Industries in Davenport. We lucked out when nearly 100 ironworkers honored our picket lines. This grabbed the attention of the news media, and got the strike off with a real bang.

Over the next ten days, we took out successive locations. The culmination was when we took out the guard at the county Neuro-Pyschiatric Ward (NP Ward). We had a good-sized press conference, with five TV stations and several newspapers in attendance.

We received really great news coverage for the duration of the strike, and that is where we won - on TV and in the newspapers. I became adept at staging media events, and we had press conferences on an almost daily basis.

After about two months, the company folded - on Friday, February 13, 1981. Most of the former employees were given jobs with union employers in the area. Wages, benefits and working conditions for security guards generally in the Monterey Bay area were substantially improved - all because the strike scared the holy bejesus out of the employers.

I was hired full-time by the international union as an organizer about a year later.

Below are pictures from the strike.