The battle over the decision to end collective bargaining for Salisbury city employees has highlighted the lack of such representation on the Eastern Shore. Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz has this look at the issue.
RUSH: Salisbury Unions and city employers are now circulating petitions for a ballot measure that would overturn the decision by the city council to end collective bargaining. But collective bargaining is not solely a Salisbury fight. Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz has this look at the labor climate for government workers on the Eastern shore.
DIAZ: Municipal workers in Salisbury won the right to unionize four years ago. At the time, they were the only city workers on Maryland's eastern shore to have union representation. It seemed like the start of a movement, maybe Easton, Cambridge, or Ocean City would be next. But today, employees of the city of Salisbury remained the only municipal workers on the Delmarva Peninsula to have collective bargaining rights, despite Maryland's reputation as a pro-union state. Now as the city council has voted to rescind that right, the city's police, fire, and municipal workers are back at square one. To some, it's a sign of the time. While labor unions have enjoyed a surge in public popularity and recent years, actual union membership rates have struggled due to pushback from employers, including government employers. Part of it may also be about geography.
BROWN: When you move to bigger cities, obviously they tend to lean a little bit more left, which inherently makes them a little bit more union friendly.
DIAZ: That's Rusty Brown from the Freedom Foundation, a conservative group that is often critical of public employee unions like the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, the union that represents many of Salisbury city workers.
BROWN: Some of them extremely so, some of them marginally so. But then when you get down to brass tacks, the collective bargaining issue, it's an increase in cost. I mean, you can look at what just happened in Virginia.
DIAZ: That's a reference to Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a democrat who nonetheless vetoed legislation in May that would've expanded collective bargaining for public workers, including firefighters and emergency medical workers. To some observers, the move was an illustration of the special status of wage earners, in the employ of local governments. When it comes to city hall, the wage battles are no longer over corporate profits, but rather, precious taxpayer dollars. Here's Brown again.
BROWN: So if you cut through all the propaganda, in the private sector, a union is bargaining with an employer over profits. What do we do with this excess money? In the government side, there's no such thing. There's only budgets.
DIAZ: Against those fiscal headwinds, local union organizers in Salisbury say there's something else at work.
HUGHES: It's not even about the money. Believe me.
DIAZ: That's Jack Hughes, an AFSCME field rep for the Eastern Shore.
HUGHES: We negotiate contracts all over the place in the state. We don't get always what we want, but we do - we sit at the table and we come to an agreement. We might not all agree or whatever, but we get there. This group, they didn't want to meet at all.
DIAZ: Despite their political setback in Salisbury, AFSCME has not given up hope of spreading it to other towns, then cities, on the Eastern shore. According to Hughes, Salisbury was just a toehold, however shaky it may seem now.
HUGHES: There's a lot of organizing going on around the country now. Unions are getting pretty popular again. As far as the public sector, Salisbury was one of the first ones on the shore. It was kind of unique in that aspect. It went through. We got it passed a couple years ago. I mean, people, a lot of people want to be in the union. I get calls from all over the place, the county workers that want to be a union, but being a union, it takes time to organize that. We got a lot of fights going on right now, but I think in the future, you're going to see more of that down here on the shore. Maybe Talbot, maybe this kind of opened the door, I guess, for the Eastern shore when we got to city employees.
DIAZ: How long the door remains open may depend on a petition effort to force a special election, putting the matter into the hands of Salisbury voters. For Delmarva Public Media, this is Kevin Diaz in Salisbury.
