Cleaning Workers Hit One Out of the Park with AFSCME

by Mike Hall, Jul 28, 2008

Baltimore stadium workers win a voice at work with AFSCME.

The workers who clean up Oriole Park at Camden Yards—home of the Baltimore Orioles—voted last week to join AFSCME. The workers reached out to the union after enduring abuse from supervisors and irregular calls for work—leading to a cut in hours for many longtime workers.

They also say management heavily pressured them to vote against the union. The 130 workers are employed by Chimes DC, which has a contract with the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA) to provide workers to clean up the stadium after the Orioles’ 82 home games each year.

Winning a voice at work was the second major victory in less than a year for the mostly immigrant workers. Last year, working with the United Workers, a Baltimore worker center, they successfully mobilized to bring their pay up from about $7 an hour to the $11.30 an hour established by Maryland’s living wage law, the first of its kind in the nation.

The law, passed in May 2007, requires contractors doing business with the state to pay employees $11.30 an hour in urban areas and $8.50 an hour in rural areas. Although the state owns the stadium, the cleaning crews are not covered by the living wage law, which exempts part-time and temporary workers.

Union members joined with community, civil rights and religious groups to rally support for the workers last year. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and MSA Chairman Frederick Puddester also both publicly supported paying the living wage. In September, the Stadium Authority voted to pay the living wage beginning this season.

But workers say that Chimes DC, which took over the contract in January, continued the same type of mistreatment they suffered at the hands of the previous contractor. Says one worker:

We had won the living wage, and that was great. But then, when we went back to work, it seemed like that was all we had won. It was the same mistreatment, the same disrespect. And even more than the living wage, what we had been demanding was that we get treated with respect.

Joe Lawrence, an AFSCME spokesman, told The Baltimore Sun:

Many long-time workers get called irregularly. The wage has much less meaning when there’s not hours being given in a regular or sufficient way.

The workers, along with AFSCME and the United Workers, began the drive to unionize in the spring and won overwhelming support and beat back management’s anti-union campaign.

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