Marcus Thompson checks temperatures at the entrance of a Memphis hospital. He’s been doing it six days a week since late March. He points a contactless thermometer at foreheads, reads the number, and waves people through or directs them to a screening area. He does this 200 to 300 times per shift. Sometimes the person on the other end of the thermometer is coughing.
Marcus makes $13.50 an hour. He doesn’t get hazard pay. His employer provides a surgical mask that he’s supposed to replace every four hours, though supplies have been inconsistent enough that he’s reused masks for two and sometimes three shifts. He doesn’t have health insurance through his company. He signed up for TennCare last year after his wife lost her job.
“People clap for nurses,” Marcus told me during a break outside the hospital’s loading dock. “I get it. Nurses deserve it. Nobody claps for the guy with the thermometer.”
Marcus is one of an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 private security guards working in Tennessee right now. The state classified them as essential workers in late March, meaning they kept working while much of the economy shut down. The classification saved their jobs. It also put them directly in the path of a virus that has killed more than 200 Tennesseans so far.
The Hospital Guards
Healthcare facility security has always been demanding work. Guards at Memphis hospitals dealt with armed patients, drug-related incidents, and psychiatric emergencies long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The pandemic added a new dimension: infection risk.
Guards at hospital entrances are the first point of human contact for everyone entering the building. They check temperatures, ask screening questions, and turn away visitors who don’t meet the current criteria. They do this without the clinical training that nurses and doctors receive. A two-hour briefing on infection control, delivered by the hospital’s safety officer, is the extent of most guards’ pandemic-specific training.
At Regional One Health in Memphis, contract security guards are screening every person who enters the facility, including staff, patients, and the handful of approved visitors. The volume is lower than pre-pandemic levels because visitor restrictions cut traffic significantly. The stakes are higher, though. Missing a symptomatic person could trigger an outbreak inside a hospital already stretched to its limits.
A guard at a Nashville hospital, who asked me not to use his name or identify his facility, described his daily routine: “I stand at a folding table near the front door. I have a thermometer, a clipboard, and a box of surgical masks. I ask three questions: do you have a fever, do you have a cough, have you been in contact with someone who tested positive. If they answer no to everything and their temperature is normal, they go in. If anything flags, I call the charge nurse.”
He paused. “What happens if I get it? I go home for two weeks with no pay. My company doesn’t do paid sick leave. I can file for unemployment, maybe, if the state ever processes the claim. I’m seven weeks into an unemployment claim for my second job that I lost in March. Haven’t seen a dime.”
The Warehouse Guards
Memphis is a logistics city. FedEx World Hub, Amazon fulfillment centers, distribution warehouses for companies like Nike, Williams-Sonoma, and AutoZone. All of these facilities kept operating through the lockdown, and all of them need security.
Guards at warehouse and distribution facilities are managing access control for workforces that have exploded in size. Amazon hired over 100,000 workers nationally in April; a significant portion of those new hires work at Tennessee facilities. Every one of them enters through a security checkpoint where a guard verifies their badge, and in some cases, checks their temperature.
The working conditions at warehouse security posts vary dramatically by employer. Amazon’s fulfillment centers in Tennessee have provided guards with PPE, installed plexiglass barriers at checkpoints, and implemented social distancing markers. Guards at these facilities report feeling relatively safe, though the volume of people they process daily still creates anxiety.
Smaller warehouses and distribution centers haven’t always matched that level of preparation. A guard working at a distribution facility near the Memphis airport described his situation: “They gave me a folding chair, a clipboard, and one mask. The mask is the same one I’ve had for three weeks. There’s no plexiglass. People walk right up to me, six inches from my face, to show their badge. I asked for a face shield and my supervisor said he’d look into it. That was two weeks ago.”
FedEx, to its credit, has maintained security staffing and PPE supplies at its Memphis operations. Guards at the World Hub wear company-provided masks and gloves, with replacements available. The hub operates 24/7, and security coverage hasn’t been reduced despite the pandemic. If anything, the increased package volume from online shopping has pushed FedEx to add security positions, particularly during the overnight sort when thousands of workers are on site.
Hazard Pay: The Conversation Nobody’s Having
Healthcare workers across the country have received hazard pay, bonuses, or enhanced benefits during the pandemic. Some warehouse workers at Amazon and other companies received temporary $2-per-hour pay increases. What about security guards?
Almost nothing.
Of the dozen Tennessee security companies I contacted for this story, only two confirmed offering any form of hazard pay or pandemic bonus to their guards. One provides an extra $1 per hour for guards assigned to healthcare facilities. The other gave a one-time $200 bonus to all active guards in April.
The rest cited financial constraints, which, to be fair, are real. Security companies operate on thin margins, typically 3% to 8% net profit. The pandemic hasn’t changed the billing rates most companies charge their clients, and the additional costs of PPE, training, and absenteeism-driven overtime are eating into whatever margin existed.
Still, the math stings. A guard earning $12 per hour, working 40 hours per week, takes home roughly $1,920 per month before taxes. That same guard is risking viral exposure on every shift, and the company billing their time at $19 to $22 per hour is making a margin on their risk.
The argument for hazard pay isn’t just ethical; it’s practical. Guards who feel undervalued quit. The security industry’s turnover rate, already north of 100% annually, is climbing during the pandemic. Companies that don’t find ways to compensate their frontline guards, whether through pay, benefits, or basic respect, will lose them to Amazon, which is hiring in every Tennessee city at $15 per hour with benefits.
Guards Getting Sick
The numbers are hard to pin down because most security companies aren’t publicly reporting COVID cases among their guards. No state or federal agency tracks infections by occupation at the level of detail needed to isolate security workers from other essential workers.
What I can report from conversations with company owners and guards themselves: it’s happening. A Nashville security company confirmed that four of its guards tested positive in April. All four worked at the same healthcare facility. The company quarantined seven additional guards who had overlapping shifts, creating a staffing crisis that required pulling guards from other accounts.
A Memphis company lost six guards to positive tests or mandatory quarantine over a three-week period. The owner described the cascading effect: “When one guard goes down, you pull someone from another post to cover. Now that post is short. You call in an off-duty guard for overtime. They’re tired, they make mistakes, and the whole thing starts falling apart.”
The guards who get sick face a particularly cruel set of choices. Most don’t have paid sick leave. Filing for unemployment takes weeks. Medical costs, even with insurance, can be significant for a hospitalization. Without insurance, a COVID hospital stay can generate bills in the tens of thousands.
Tennessee’s workers’ compensation system may cover guards who contract COVID-19 on the job, though proving workplace exposure (as opposed to community exposure) is difficult. A few states have created presumptions that essential workers who test positive contracted the virus at work. Tennessee hasn’t done that, leaving guards to navigate the standard workers’ comp claims process while sick and without income.
The Human Cost
Reginald James worked as a security guard at a nursing home in Shelby County. He was 54 years old. He’d been in the security industry for 16 years. He died from COVID-19 complications on April 22, according to his family, who shared his story to honor his memory and to point out what they called a systemic failure to protect frontline workers.
His sister told me that Reginald showed up to work every day during the pandemic because he needed the paycheck. He wore the one mask his company gave him. He washed his hands constantly. He did everything right, and it wasn’t enough.
I can’t independently verify whether Reginald’s infection was workplace-acquired. His family believes it was. The nursing home where he worked had reported multiple COVID cases among residents and staff. His company declined to comment.
Stories like Reginald’s aren’t unique to Tennessee, and they aren’t unique to the security industry. Every essential worker category, from grocery store clerks to bus drivers, has similar tragedies. What makes the security guard experience distinct is the combination of low pay, minimal benefits, lack of recognition, and direct exposure to high-risk environments.
Nurses are heroes. Doctors are heroes. First responders are heroes. Security guards? They’re the people you walk past on your way in. Essential enough to keep working, invisible enough to keep ignoring.
What Needs to Change
The pandemic will end eventually. The conditions that made it so dangerous for security guards won’t end with it unless the industry changes.
Paid sick leave should be standard in security contracts. A guard who can’t afford to stay home when sick is a liability to every person they interact with. The cost of paid sick leave, roughly $1 to $2 per guard hour when amortized across a workforce, is minimal compared to the cost of a COVID outbreak at a guarded facility.
PPE stockpiles should be maintained by every security company, not as a pandemic response, as a permanent operational requirement. Guards interact with the public constantly. Respiratory illness is always a risk. The companies that had PPE ready in March survived the shortage. The ones that didn’t scrambled and failed.
Health insurance should be accessible to full-time guards. The industry’s heavy reliance on part-time and variable-hour scheduling specifically designed to avoid benefits thresholds is a model that fails during any health crisis. Companies can’t call their workers essential and then structure their employment to avoid providing essential benefits.
Recognition matters too, even if it doesn’t pay the bills. A guard who’s been checking temperatures at a hospital entrance for six weeks while making less than an Amazon warehouse picker deserves, at minimum, acknowledgment from the clients they’re protecting and the public they’re serving.
Marcus Thompson is still at his post at the Memphis hospital. Six days a week. 200 to 300 temperature checks per shift. $13.50 an hour. No hazard pay. He told me he’ll keep showing up because he has a family to feed and because, in his words, “somebody’s got to do it.”
Somebody does. We should at least know their names.