On September 9, President Biden announced that all private employers with 100 or more employees would be required to ensure their workers are either fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing. The details are still being worked out through OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard, which hasn’t been formally published yet. But the announcement itself has already started shaking up the private security industry in ways that Memphis property managers need to understand.
The short version: if you rely on a national security company to protect your property, your guard workforce is about to get squeezed even harder than it already is.
Who Has to Comply
The 100-employee threshold captures every major security firm operating in the Memphis market. Allied Universal, the largest private security company in North America, employs more than 250,000 people. Securitas AB’s U.S. operations employ over 100,000. Garda World, G4S (now merged with Allied), and dozens of mid-size regional firms all clear the threshold easily.
For these companies, the mandate means every guard, supervisor, dispatcher, and office worker must be fully vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID testing. The testing option exists as an alternative, but it creates logistical headaches and recurring costs that nobody is excited about managing.
Smaller Memphis security companies with fewer than 100 employees fall below the threshold and are exempt from the federal mandate. That’s a meaningful distinction in a market where several well-known local firms operate with 40 to 80 employees. These companies can continue operating without a vaccination requirement, which gives them a temporary recruiting advantage over the nationals.
The Tennessee Factor
Tennessee’s state government has been openly hostile to vaccine mandates from the start.
Governor Bill Lee signed an executive order in August 2021 allowing parents to opt their children out of school mask mandates. The legislature called a special session in October specifically to push back on federal vaccine requirements. Lawmakers are considering bills that would prohibit Tennessee employers from requiring vaccination as a condition of employment, though the legal relationship between state law and federal OSHA standards remains an open question.
Memphis sits in an awkward position within this debate. Shelby County has generally taken a more cautious approach to COVID than the rest of Tennessee. The county’s health department issued a mask mandate in August that covered indoor public spaces. Mayor Jim Strickland, though, has been reluctant to impose a vaccine mandate on city employees, and he’s said publicly that he doesn’t believe mandates are the best approach to increasing vaccination rates.
The vaccination rate in Shelby County as of late October hovers around 45% for fully vaccinated residents. That’s higher than many rural Tennessee counties but lower than the national average. Among the demographic groups that make up a large portion of the security guard workforce (younger adults, lower-income workers, and communities of color) vaccination rates run lower still.
What This Means for Guard Availability
The practical reality that nobody in the industry wants to talk about publicly is straightforward: some security guards will quit rather than get vaccinated.
Not most of them. Not even a large minority, probably. But in a labor market where security companies in Memphis are already struggling to fill shifts, losing even 5-10% of the workforce to vaccine refusal would be devastating.
The anecdotal reports from company owners paint a consistent picture. At firms that have begun surveying their workforce, roughly 20-30% of guards say they are not vaccinated and are hesitant or unwilling to get the shots. Not all of those people will actually quit when faced with the choice between vaccination and unemployment. Many will grumble and get vaccinated. Some will choose weekly testing as the alternative. But a segment of the workforce will walk.
Where do they go? To smaller companies that fall below the 100-employee threshold. To other industries that aren’t covered by the mandate. Or out of the workforce entirely, at least for a while.
For the big national firms, this creates a cascading problem. They’re already short-staffed in Memphis. They’ve already raised wages to compete with Amazon and FedEx. Now they need to implement a vaccination tracking system, arrange weekly testing for the unvaccinated holdouts, and absorb the inevitable attrition. All while trying to keep their clients’ sites covered.
The Healthcare Preview
If you want to see how a vaccine mandate plays out in practice, look at what’s already happening in Memphis healthcare.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a separate mandate requiring vaccination for all workers at healthcare facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding. That covers virtually every hospital and nursing home in the city.
Methodist Le Bonheur, Baptist Memorial, and Regional One have all announced vaccine requirements for their employees. The early results are instructive. At some facilities, the mandate accelerated vaccination significantly — workers who had been on the fence got their shots rather than lose their jobs. At others, particularly nursing homes and long-term care facilities, staffing has gotten worse as workers left rather than comply.
Memphis hospitals were already dealing with staffing shortages from burnout and pandemic fatigue. The vaccine mandate added another layer of pressure. Several facilities have granted religious and medical exemptions at rates higher than anyone expected, which may reflect genuine beliefs or may reflect the fact that losing more nurses would be catastrophic.
The security industry is watching the healthcare situation closely because the dynamics are remarkably similar. An essential workforce. A tight labor market. Workers who have strong personal opinions about vaccination. And employers who can’t afford to lose people they’ve already spent money recruiting and training.
Property Managers Caught in the Middle
If you manage commercial or residential property in Memphis and you contract with a national security company, here is what you should be thinking about:
Ask your provider about their compliance plan. When the OSHA rule is finalized, large security companies will need a defined process for tracking vaccination status, arranging testing, and handling non-compliant employees. Your provider should be able to tell you what that process looks like and how it might affect staffing at your specific site.
Identify your backup options. If your current provider loses guards to vaccine-related attrition, do you have a secondary company you can call on short notice? This is a good time to establish relationships with one or two alternative providers, particularly smaller local firms that won’t be subject to the mandate.
Don’t assume exemptions will save everyone. The OSHA standard is expected to include provisions for religious and medical exemptions, but the details and enforcement mechanisms aren’t clear yet. Building a staffing plan around the assumption that most of your guards will get exemptions is risky.
Budget for cost increases. Vaccine mandate compliance costs money. Testing costs money. Replacing workers who leave costs money. Those expenses will find their way into your contract pricing, either through explicit surcharges or through general rate increases at your next renewal.
Consider the optics. If your property serves the public, say a retail center, a medical office building, or a hotel, having vaccinated security staff may matter to your tenants and their customers. Or it may not, depending on your tenant mix and the political leanings of your clientele. Either way, it’s a conversation worth having.
The Legal Mess Ahead
The Biden vaccine mandate is almost certainly going to face legal challenges. Multiple state attorneys general, including Tennessee’s, have signaled they intend to sue. Industry groups are weighing their options. The timeline for OSHA to finalize and enforce the rule remains uncertain.
This legal uncertainty creates its own set of problems. Security companies need to plan for compliance now if the rule takes effect on schedule. They also need to prepare for the possibility that an injunction delays or blocks implementation. And they have to manage a workforce that is reading conflicting headlines about whether the mandate is actually going to happen.
For Memphis property managers, the best approach is to plan as if the mandate will take effect as described and adjust if the legal situation changes. The alternative, assuming courts will strike it down and doing no planning, leaves you exposed if the mandate survives legal challenge and your security provider loses staff overnight.
A Workforce Already Under Strain
Zoom out from the vaccine issue and the picture gets even more complicated.
Memphis security guards are already dealing with rising crime, increasing client demands, and a cost of living that hasn’t kept pace with the modest wage increases they’ve received. The vaccine mandate is one more stress on a workforce that was already under enormous pressure.
The guards working the midnight shift at a Downtown Memphis parking garage or checking vehicles at a Germantown gated community didn’t sign up for a culture war. They signed up for a job. Whether that job now requires a vaccination is a decision that’s being made far above their pay grade, in Washington and Nashville and corporate boardrooms in places they’ve never been.
The security companies that handle this transition with some degree of grace and flexibility will keep more of their people. The ones that send out a memo and expect compliance will lose staff they can’t replace.
And Memphis property managers, as usual, will deal with whatever rolls downhill.
That’s the job. It always has been. The vaccine mandate just adds one more thing to the pile.