Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott rallied with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in South Baltimore Saturday morning on the last leg of a nationwide tour encouraging people to fill open positions in local government.
“Everybody needs to have an opportunity to be involved, everybody needs to have an opportunity to participate, everybody needs to feel secure,” Moore said. “Let’s staff the frontlines, and let’s build our state.”
Flanked by union members, Moore and Scott, both Democrats, stood alongside Patrick Moran, the president of the Maryland chapter of the AFSCME, and Lee Saunders, the union’s national president, outside of a job fair to fill positions in state and city government.
AFSCME represents 1.4 million workers across the nation — approximately 45,000 of whom work in Maryland. The union’s nationwide tour, which stopped in 17 cities, held its last leg in Baltimore Saturday.
Saunders said that the overwhelming message he’s heard from public sector employees is that they are “burned out.”
“They really are burned out — they really are tired,” he said. “Even though they’re working overtime, they’re making more money, they need a break. And they know that public services are suffering because they don’t have that person on the left of them or the right of them to work with them.”
There are currently over 4,000 open state employee positions across Maryland.
Ahead of his inauguration in January, Moore announced his intention to fill half of the nearly 10,000 state employee positions left vacant by the Hogan administration during his first year in office.
With only four months left, Moore said with a smile that “we’re not there yet.”
“But we’re making great progress,” he said.
AFSCME officials often found themselves at odds with Hogan and his executive cabinet.
Moran, who led the union during the Hogan administration, described Moore’s goal to fill so many vacancies “lofty,” but commended him for taking it on, adding that the relationship between AFSCME and state government has “come a long way” during Moore’s first nine months in office, but still has “a long way to go.”
“There’s a lot of people from the previous administration that are still milling about, that still want to do things their way, and I think the Moore administration is slowly but surely addressing those problems and those concerns to make sure that, moving forward, we have a better relationship,” Moran said after the event Saturday. “It’s been night-and-day in terms of just being able to sit down and try to hash things out.”
Though the past few years have been tough, the union has had wins in 2023.
Under the nascent governor’s first budget, state employees will net approximately $35 million in salary increases aimed at retaining workers who the state has employed for five or more years.
Moore also secured an increase on the state’s minimum wage, which will grow from $13.25 to $15 on Jan. 1.
Unionized workers in Baltimore City haven’t been left out, either.
Scott announced Saturday that, “for the first time in a generation,” unionized wastewater employees “are going to be paid a living wage here in Baltimore.”
“No longer are we going to be paying folks who are working and making sure that the best tasting public water … in the country are making $30,000 and $32,000 when their colleagues in other places are making $40,000 and $42,000,” Scott said. “We’re not going to have that anymore here in Baltimore.”
In an interview after Saturday’s event, Dorothy Bryant, the AFSCME member in charge of overseeing city and school board employees, said that the Baltimore City Board of Estimates approved a wage increase Wednesday, giving wastewater workers raises between $3,000 and $10,000.
Bryant said that the increase doesn’t bring city wastewater workers’ salaries quite to the level of those in surrounding counties, but is much closer.
“We are so grateful,” Bryant said. “They needed that because they are the ones that actually get down into the trenches.”
“They deserve every penny that they are getting,” Bryant said.
Scott said Saturday that there are “thousands” of government jobs to be filled in the city, emphasizing the need for solid waste workers, truck drivers, police officers and firefighters.
“We want everyone to know that … you don’t have to work one of these jobs with no benefits for the rest of your life,” Scott said. “You can come and have a great, solid career working in city government, working in local government, working in state government, and provide for your family and be able to pass on that generational wealth to the generation coming behind you.”
Moore, Scott, Moran and Saunders all stressed that it is imperative for elected officials to collaborate with the union to ensure that Maryland provides excellent service and a higher quality of life for its residents.
“I am the mayor of Baltimore because my grandfather moved here and had a good union job, and then my mom had a good union job and then got me into a good union job,” Scott said. “And now, it’s time for the next generation to do that.”
