I should have gotten the hint when I went to apply for a job at Executive Security Systems, Inc (ESSI) and it was pay day. I met an African American gentleman who was apparently picking up his last paycheck and, according to him, it was short.
"Man, I need to tell you, don't go to work here! They short your checks, "he warned me. "I been looking for a job and can't get one 'cause they give job references from hell."
I figured he was just a disgruntled former employee but I had not been in Austin, Texas that long. The economy here was white-hot and I thought I would get a security guard and some school hours while I was here.
Well, I should have listened to him, as it turns out.
In Dallas, if you are qualified to do the job and don't have a criminal record, it doesn't matter what color, gender, ethnicity you are, you will be put to work and your record will speak for itself.
This does not appear to be true in Austin. It is extremely difficult to get a job unless you have a pstron or person of influence to vouch for you. I am not sure why this is either. If you don't have a patron, it can take up to three weeks or so before employers will let you know if you are hired or not. I also found that people get blackballed a lot here and it happened to me and several people I know who worked here whom I interviewed for this article.
I guess the ESSI Austin office all starts with the Charter Security Group. I went to the Texas Department of Public Safety website, the part that deals with private security agencies and I looked it up. For some reason, Charter shows up in Addison, TX even though they apparently had an Austin, Texas office as well connections with an office at Bryan College Station, Texas (Which may have been Minglewood Security, Inc). Both places have a surfeit of cheap student labor to maximize profits.
Charter went out of business in 1991. It was bought by ESSI in Dallas, TX. A complete list of employees was not available, however what was left showed that there were no women working for them and only one person with a Hispanic last name, one of the few people who is still working in the private security industry who worked for them. Two of their former employees were denied a commission to carry a firearm and another one's records were ordered locked by DPS Bureau. You can go on the DPS site and look up the Charter Security Group and some to your own conclusions.
I wasn't trained on my posts. The post instructions that they gave me were always out of date and I, too, was not warned about the alarm on the office door of the Bristol Square apartments that apparently went directly to the Austin police and dispatched an unhappy police officer who appeared to be on steroids and wanted to beat me up and take me in. Had I not called my supervisor when the alarm went off, I would have been jacked up on a burglary offense even though it was my job to check the doors and makes sure they were all locked — and that one had been open. Deliberate? I am not sure to this day.
There is an EEOC category of supposedly illegal things that employers do to their employees and when they don't train them for the job that they are expected to do —including listing a job description, they are "setting the employee up for failure." If this is done to an employee in a protected age group, a minority group member or a female, then it is assumed there is prejudice for which an employee can get extra damages —assuming the employee has the money for an attorney to instigate the suit.
The best-known example of this occurred recently when they had a half-Native American gentleman in the protected age group and they put him on patrol. He was thrown a book that showed locations of the places he was supposed to inspect and no further instruction. The same tactic has been done on anyone that is not "one of the boyz" and it works very well... The man is no longer there —and he is getting job references from hell.
Austin, Texas claims to be a laid-back, cool place that doesn't like law and order or anyone telling them where
(especially "rent a pigs", the insulting term for security officers) and when to drink alcohol or what to do at all —but you can better believe there is apparently a WASP "good old boy" system like in the South where uppedity Blacks, women and Messcans and other minorities are put in their place. There is almost always one token person from each minority at work because prejudice in employment in Austin is frowned upon —at least overtly.
After I had faced down a rather perilous situation and guarded a construction site where a previous contractor had been fired and he sent a private investigation agency in to find out who had replaced him so he could sue all of them, I was asked to go to patrol.
A security service patrol is a rip-off to the security clients and to the security personnel who have to do it.
I see elsewhere on this site where people have made mention of it and it is everything they say it is. ESSI Austin is particuliarly ill-organized, apprently by people who have never actually themselves got in the patrol vehicles and tried to drive the "routes" as the patrol jurisdictions are called. These people have tried to cram as many patrol inspections (called "hits) as possible into as much territory as a vehicle can possibly cover! IF you don't have the proper training, you might miss a patrol hit and the client is not getting what they paid the security company for. This is called fraud. At the price of $4 - $6 a patrol "hit" —the client really does get what they pay for most of the time. When you consider when I was there, the patrol officer also had to respond to alarms, make escorts of persons who repaired ATMs, make sure employees got out of various businesses safely at closing time, responded to disturbance calls in apartment complexes, made deliveries and had to lock and unlock various buildings at certain times. If you actually apprehended anyone committing a crime and had to detain for the police or deputies, instead of getting a commendation, you would probably be fired with the subsequent blacklisting that went with it because you would have missed your patrol hits. The stress was unbelievable!
All of which we were only getting paid $5 when I worked there. The guys nowdays are getting paid according to the individual patrol account, I am told and they are forbidden to elaborate. I want ot know what I am making before I even set foot on a post, much less a patrol account!
It's not a problem to get fired for being unable to do an impossible job in an incredibly hostile work environment, it is the snide, vindictive job references —entirely false —that come later. And idiot employers in Austin believe this person. The fascade of respectability and the belief that security officers should be honest like the police are supposed to be and the people who operate the companies are supposed to be paragons of virture. Not in Austin, Texas. And not at ESSI.
The patrol officers coped with the untentable situation in two ways. Ran the hell out of the patrol vehicles and hoped that the police did not ticket you (because they despised us and lay in wait for us, especially at Rollingwood and Noerthwest Hills). This meant no lunch breaks or any sort of breaks that the US Department of Transportation has mandated for commercial drivers and the restroom was whatever dark place you found yourself in and forget any lunch break, You were forbidden to eat in the vehicles. Eating in the vehicles was not considered "professional" by the hopelessly out of touch people in the office who had never had the actual experience of running a patrol route. One of them actually tried to run a patrol route recently, I heard, but walked off before he even ran half the route. Not being able to train anyone else on that route, he fired a veteran patrol officer because he could not learn it on his own. Set up for failure and violation of Wage and Hour restroom and lunch break policy.
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed... Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows that the good guys lost"... From bumper music heard on Reublic Broadcasting Network...
The other way they coped was not to run the patrol route at all. One of the patrol officers at ESSI who did prison time and can no longer be employed as a security officer in Texas in a damily violence incident, would sit at Jim's Resaturant at the intersection of Ben White Blvd. And I-35 South for his entire shift and write imaginary patrol hits and fictious reports. He bragged about it to anyone who cared to listen. This practice is called "ghosting" and nobody but nobody should have done it for an entire shift. The acting general manager knew about it, the patrol manager knew about it, just like they knoew that he would show up for work drunk but they would make his hits for him.
I talked face to face with two women this guy harrassed and one of them had a daughter with him! They worked at ESSI Austin and one reported that she had complained about him but nothing had been done. The regional manager/vice-president apparently dropped the ball on this because she went and complained to the CIty of Austin Human Rights Commission and the EEOC but nothing was done there either. Apparently the Corporate Headquarters did something after the complaints were filed but she was gone and the other woman was apparently too scared to complain. She was working for an elite security company in Austin, but I have no idea what happened to her. Perhaps she went back to South Texas where she came from. Nothing was done because neither one could afford legal representation and the statute of limitations has expired.
The same guy liked to slash tires and smash window glass in vehicles of the people he did not like. At least three patrol officers went to work for another company because of him.
In my case, I know why he was not terminated and it was "for special services provided..." Patrol was supposed to be an elite assignment. We were provided with white Nissan pickup trucks with standard shifts. This served the purpose of excluding women, certain minorities who had no experience with stick shifts from the patrol division back then. Because I did, they couldn't keep me out of the patrol sector. The turnover was so high that they would take whoever was stupid enough to agree to go in the trucks! Then when enough young white boys came on board, excuses would be thought up to get rid of people like me.
We were personally responsible for any tickets we incurred. There is supposed to be a vicarious liability on company-owned vehicles whereby the corpoartion is responsiblke for any actions their employees take, including traffic tickets and especially equipment violations such as burned out tail lights and headlights. It is rather unfair for a coproation to expect the $5 an hour personnel to pay for oil, brake fluid, head light and tail light installation on their own —but we had to pay the tickets for the traffic light violations that the police wrote to us.
I remember the fear I felt when the Westlake Hills police officer pulled me over and I searched for the proof of insurance card and it was not there! Fortunately, she did not ask to see it or I would have been the one who got the ticket for driving with no insurance! And I would have been the one who would have had to pay it or go to jail!
When I got back to the office, I asked the other patrol officers if they had proof of insurance card in case mine had been taken out of my truck because I was being set up to go to jail and possibly lose my commission. Nobody had one. I went to the patrol manager who told me that he didn't know why there were no proof of insurance cards in the trucks and it was none of my business. I never saw one as long as I worked there and I started putting out my resume to get out of there.
The interim office manager was allegedly compiling incriminating evidence that he said he was going to take somewhere. I imagine whatever he had did not go far because the last time I checked his entry on the DPS Security Agency site, he hasn't worked in the private security field since then, nor will he.
If officers wrecked the truck, the general policy was that they had to pay for the replacement. I don't know if they were charged the Blue Book rate for fully depreciated vehicles or if they were charged for new rates. The thing was that they didn't even get to keep the truck they wrecked after they had paid for it —at least they could have parted it out and got something for it. There was somehing in the employment contract that they signed, I am told. I had no intention of wrecking it because I coudln't afford to and I never did. But there was one incident...
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