The question lands on every security company owner’s desk in Memphis eventually. Sometimes it comes from a hospital administrator. Sometimes from a property manager at an East Memphis office park. Sometimes from a corporate HR director who’s drafting return-to-office plans.
“Are your guards vaccinated?”
Six months ago, the question was hypothetical. Vaccines weren’t widely available yet. Now every adult in Tennessee can walk into a pharmacy and get a shot. The question has teeth. And Memphis security companies are scrambling to figure out their answer.
The Pressure Is Coming From Clients
Let’s start with who’s asking, because that shapes everything.
Hospitals were first. Methodist Le Bonheur, Baptist Memorial, and St. Jude have all moved toward requiring COVID vaccination for contractors working inside their facilities. Security guards posted at hospital entrances, emergency room lobbies, and parking structures fall squarely in that category. If your company has a hospital contract in Memphis, you’re already dealing with this.
Corporate offices came next. The office parks along Poplar Avenue and in the Germantown corridor are bringing employees back, and their HR departments want to know that the guard checking badges at the lobby desk has been vaccinated. It’s part of the return-to-office safety pitch: “We’ve cleaned the HVAC, we’ve spaced the desks, and yes, the security staff is vaccinated.”
Retail clients are mostly not asking. Neither are construction sites, warehouses, or residential communities. The divide tracks closely with how much face-to-face interaction a guard has with the client’s employees or customers. A night watchman at a distribution facility on Holmes Road doesn’t interact with many people. A guard at a medical plaza on Humphreys Boulevard interacts with patients all day.
Tennessee’s Political Reality
Any conversation about vaccine mandates in Tennessee requires acknowledging the political backdrop. This is a state where the legislature has been actively hostile to vaccine requirements. Governor Lee signed legislation limiting local health authorities’ power to impose mandates. Multiple bills are working through the General Assembly right now that would restrict employers’ ability to require vaccinations.
For a Memphis security company owner, this creates a strange position. Your biggest client, say a hospital system, wants only vaccinated guards. Your state government is moving in the opposite direction, signaling that vaccine mandates are government overreach. You’re caught between the two.
“I had a state representative’s office call me after a client posted on social media that our guards were all vaccinated,” one company owner told me. He asked to remain anonymous. “The representative wanted to know if we were mandating vaccines. We weren’t mandating anything. We were just assigning vaccinated guards to clients who requested them. There’s a difference, but the politics don’t care about the difference.”
The Workforce Math Doesn’t Add
Here’s the core problem, and it has nothing to do with politics or public health philosophy. It’s arithmetic.
Tennessee’s vaccination rate sits around 38-40% of the total population right now. Shelby County is slightly higher, somewhere near 42%. Among the demographic that makes up most of the security guard workforce, specifically working-age adults without college degrees, earning $12 to $14 an hour, vaccination rates run lower than the general population.
Security companies in Memphis are already short-staffed. Every owner I’ve spoken with in the past three months has described a hiring crisis. They can’t find enough guards to fill existing contracts. Posts go unfilled. Overtime costs are eating margins. Some companies have turned down new business because they literally don’t have the bodies to cover it.
Now imagine telling 20-30% of your existing workforce that they need to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. In a labor market where guards can quit on Friday and start at a competing company on Monday, a vaccine mandate is a workforce retention gamble that most small and mid-sized companies can’t afford to take.
“I’ve got 85 guards,” said the owner of a local security firm that covers commercial properties across Shelby County. “Maybe 50 of them are vaccinated. If I mandate it and 15 of the unvaccinated ones quit, I can’t cover my contracts. I’ll lose the contracts before I lose the guards. It’s that simple.”
How the Big Nationals Are Handling It
Allied Universal and Securitas, the two largest security companies operating in Memphis, have the advantage of corporate infrastructure and legal teams that can navigate this terrain more carefully.
Allied has taken a strongly encouraged approach nationally, offering incentives for vaccinated employees and requiring vaccination for guards assigned to specific client sites that demand it. They haven’t issued a blanket mandate across all positions. Securitas has followed a similar path: comply with client requirements on a site-by-site basis without imposing a company-wide rule.
This approach works when you have thousands of employees and can shuffle staffing to match vaccinated guards with clients who require it. A local company with 40 or 80 guards doesn’t have that flexibility. If their hospital client wants vaccinated guards and only 60% of their people have gotten the shot, they’re pulling from a shrinking pool every time they make a schedule.
The nationals also have legal departments that stay current on employment law, EEOC guidance on medical and religious exemptions, and state-level legislation. A small Memphis company owner is reading the same news articles everyone else reads and trying to make policy decisions without a lawyer on retainer.
The Incentive Approach
Some Memphis companies have tried the carrot instead of the stick. Offering bonuses, typically $50 to $100, for guards who show proof of vaccination. A few are offering extra PTO days. One company I spoke with is entering vaccinated employees into a monthly drawing for a $500 gift card.
The results have been mixed. Guards making $12 an hour don’t turn down an extra hundred dollars, and some companies report that their incentive programs pushed vaccination rates among staff from 50% up to around 65%. That’s meaningful progress.
The counterargument is that you’re paying people extra to do something that’s free and widely available. You’re also creating a two-tier dynamic where vaccinated guards feel they’re carrying more risk and getting a one-time bonus while unvaccinated colleagues face no consequences.
“I gave every vaccinated guard a hundred-dollar bonus in April,” one owner told me. “Now my vaccinated guards are asking why the unvaccinated ones still get the same shifts and the same hourly rate. I created a morale problem by trying to solve a health problem.”
The Legal Gray Zone
Can a private employer in Tennessee require COVID vaccination as a condition of employment? Right now, in June 2021, the answer is probably yes, with exemptions for medical conditions and sincerely held religious beliefs. The EEOC has issued guidance supporting employer vaccine mandates as long as those exemptions are honored.
The complication is that Tennessee’s legislature seems determined to change that calculus. Bills under consideration would restrict or prohibit private employer vaccine mandates. Nothing has passed yet, and there’s genuine uncertainty about what will become law and when.
Security company owners are making decisions today that might conflict with state law three months from now. That’s an uncomfortable position for any small business, particularly one operating on thin margins in a competitive labor market.
Employment attorneys in Memphis are doing brisk business advising security companies and other employers on this exact question. The standard advice seems to be: don’t mandate, do encourage, accommodate client requirements on a site-by-site basis, and document everything.
What Guards Think
I talked to nine security guards across Memphis this month. Five were vaccinated. Four were not. Their perspectives were more varied than the political debate suggests.
One vaccinated guard at a Midtown commercial property said he got the shot because his mother has diabetes and he didn’t want to bring COVID home. “It wasn’t about work. It was about my mama.” He said he wouldn’t quit if his company mandated it, but he understood why some coworkers felt differently.
An unvaccinated guard working overnight at a warehouse near the airport said he doesn’t trust the vaccines because they were developed too quickly. “They usually take ten years. These took ten months. That doesn’t sit right with me.” He said if his company required vaccination, he’d find another job. “There’s plenty of security work in Memphis right now. I’d have a new post by the end of the week.”
Another unvaccinated guard, working retail in the Wolfchase area, said she intended to get vaccinated eventually and was just waiting. “I’m not anti-vax. I’m just cautious. My doctor said to wait a few months and see how things go. I’m following my doctor’s advice.”
The diversity of reasons matters. Lumping all unvaccinated guards into one category, resistant, anti-science, politically motivated. That framing misses the reality that people have different reasons for their choices, and those reasons affect how they’d respond to a mandate.
Where This Is Heading
Nobody I’ve talked to expects the vaccine question to resolve cleanly in 2021. Clients will keep asking. Guards will keep having opinions. State politics will keep making the legal framework uncertain. And security companies will keep improvising.
The most likely outcome for Memphis is a patchwork approach. Big national companies follow corporate policies that are carefully lawyered. Local companies assign vaccinated guards to clients who require it and don’t ask questions about the rest. Some guards get vaccinated for the bonus. Some get vaccinated for personal reasons. Some never do.
It’s messy. It’s imperfect. And it’s probably the most realistic path forward for an industry that’s already fighting a staffing crisis and can’t afford to lose a quarter of its workforce over a policy decision.
The question “are your guards vaccinated?” isn’t going away. How Memphis security companies answer it will shape their client relationships, their workforce stability, and their competitive position for the rest of this year and beyond.
Sarah Chen covers the security industry in Memphis and the Mid-South. Contact her at [email protected].