At the risk of a short highjack, I’ll reply. Generally, a large company will hire a contractor for security. In my experience, this is the company that has a combination of lowest bid / best sales presentation. Since the corporation is paying the contractor, they generally have no idea with the average security drone earns. And security is usually a hard job, if only because of the boredom.
This is where corporations are often penny wise and pound foolish. For instance, as tlw said, they could overcome the entire tailgating issue simply by investing in turnstile-type entry ways. A bit of a pain, sure, but oil companies, for instance, house data worth literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and corporate espionage/sabotage is a very real danger (although this is often committed by disgruntled employees and ex-employees).
Having worked for a security company for a number of years, it doesnt suprise me in the least when something like this happens. Security companies are generally the low bidders, and when you pay a company 10 bucks an hour for a guard, you can bet that guard isnt making much. The only kind of people who do this sort of work for min wage are Students, Wanna be cops, retired people etc. If I were hiring a security company, I would want to know how much the officers were being paid, and I would want proof that it was a reasonable amount…even though I would have to pay more for it.
When I worked, the best people got the highest paying gigs, because thats the only way you kept the best people. If a company wanted someone to sit in their car and write down plate numbers and only wanted to pay the company 10 bucks an hour,then they got the people who were only capable of doing that. Banks, Nightclubs, and bingo halls, believe it or not, got the best people because they paid better.
(I made much more than Minimum BTW, and was expected to earn it)
I can kind of sympathize… Our security company has, in its employ, a guy that has served 3 years in the Montana State Prison for rape. No, I didn’t come by this information though conjecture, or third hand rumors, or the gossip mill. While he wasn’t a friend of mine, we hung out in the same crowd in my younger years. I remember the case very well, though it’s been 10 or so years ago. This is the very same guy, that while out partying at the lake one night, flipped out and pulled a shotgun out from behind the seat of his truck when a buddy of his took his keys in the valiant effort to keep him from driving in his highly intoxicated state. Turns out the gun wasn’t loaded, but how the hell were we supposed to know that. Anyways… his family runs the security company, he’s married with a son, he has found god, and according to him, all past sins have been forgiven.
Yeah, whatever… I don’t trust him farther than I can throw him. He was a slick, nasty, mean spirited weasel back in the day, and he gives me the cold chills when he does his walkthroughs at night. I’m just glad I no longer work by myself anymore. ::shudder::
Sounds like standard American large corporation, to me. Invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in hardware and software for an elaborate computer system, then fire every programmer over 35 so that they can hire kids (or offshore kids) as cheaply as possible to maintain it. This despite the fact that the kids (many of them outstandingly competent technically), often have no business experience, so that every upgrade will be designed and installed multiple times as the kids learn to ask the right questions to make the correct changes.) Or invest millions in a new product line, then, when a problem is discovered, spend more money in a PR campaign to hide the problem than they would have spent to simply correct the problem (because the PR campaign comes out of a different budget and the problem is easier to hide, that way).
