With California's unemployment rate hovering near 12 percent, The Bee's defense of cutthroat contractors – whose business practices put hard-working janitors, security guards and window washers in a constant state of job insecurity – is unfathomable.

Everyone who works hard deserves to live in dignity. But property service contractors imagine the only way to make profits is to create poverty. Racing to undercut competitors means contracts can change hands almost overnight.

Workers are often the last to find out they've lost their jobs.

Contractors didn't cause the recession, but their employment practices have aggravated it. These contractors have created a new model of temporary work that puts working families on the knife's edge of imminent catastrophe.

If our leaders do not act, contractors will continue to hurt working families, undermine the embattled middle class and be an obstacle for renewed prosperity for all.

California's Legislature has a chance to bring a modicum of economic security to property service workers like Nadira Mambuki by passing Assembly Bill 350. Like most Americans, Mambuki, who worked at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, lived paycheck to paycheck. Despite years of hard work, Mambuki lost her job without warning when the building changed security contractors. Overnight, her family was left to rely on unemployment insurance and scrambled to find ways to pay for rent, utilities and groceries.

AB 350 is hardly the radical measure The Bee depicted. AB 350 does not give the union or anyone else the right to decide whom the businesses employ; the final say remains with employers, as it should. In fact, the California Supreme Court has ruled that bills like this do not interfere with businesses and workers' legal rights.

Rather, AB 350 provides a stable transition period that protects these hard-working people and their families. The same transition protections have been in place for a decade for janitors, and employers cannot produce a single example of a real problem.

Instead, AB 350 provides notice to property service workers and gives them 60 days to prove themselves to the new boss or to seek a new job. This is a modest but important step toward an economy that works for working families, and legislators should embrace it.

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Mike Garcia, president of SEIU-United Service Workers West, is responding to the Aug. 9 editorial "Union bill would tie hands of employers," which states: "To require an employer to take on a workforce that is not their own, one that the business owner has not been allowed to vet, is just plain wrong."

• Read more articles by Mike Garcia