Hundreds of unionized security guards marched through midtown Thursday afternoon, demanding new contracts with cost-of-living raises, improved health benefits and training.

The workers are members of the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, which represents 4,000 security guards working in New York City offices and other commercial buildings. Their old contracts are set to expire, starting next week.

Calls for a new contract weren't the only message coming out of the protest. The union is using negotiations to highlight the low wages and lack of benefits facing the large majority of the city’s 60,000 security guards who are not unionized. Hundreds of those officers joined the demonstration.

“For too long, security officers have been left behind,” says Hector Figueroa, the union’s secretary-treasurer. “The time has come to significantly improve the wages, benefits and training for all security officers.”

Local 32BJ is negotiating contracts with both the Realty Advisory Board, which represents owners and managers of commercial office buildings, and the national security contractors AlliedBarton and Securitas/Burns. The RAB contract expires May 15 and the others run out at various points through August.

The security guards work at commercial office buildings, universities and cultural institutions such as Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

The union’s bargaining committee rejected a late April offer by RAB that it contends included raises that would not have provided workers with cost-of-living increases. James Berg, president of RAB, was traveling and unavailable for comment. AlliedBarton declined to comment, and calls to Securitas/Burns were not immediately returned. Further bargaining is scheduled for Tuesday, two days before the current RAB deal is set to expire.

For the union, achieving new contracts for guards goes hand-in-hand with continuing the drive to organize non-union security officers, who earn as little as $8 an hour, without benefits. Many non-union guards work in buildings with union cleaners, often earning less than half as much as the cleaners.

The median hourly wage for private security guards in the city is $11.13, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Local 32BJ guards earn a median of $13, with health care for full-time workers.

“We protect buildings worth millions of dollars, but are paid peanuts for our hard work,” says Ivan Shelley, a non-union officer who works in a Park Avenue commercial office building. “After nearly 15 years doing security work, I still don’t have health care.”

Over the past six months, security officers in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis have won new contracts that raise wages and improve benefits. In April, Local 32BJ signed the first-ever union contracts for security officers in Washington D.C., raising wages to a minimum of $12.40 an hour and winning employer-paid family health care for full-time workers.

“New York City’s security officers deserve what officers in Washington D.C. just won,” says Michael Fishman, president of Local 32BJ.