MD union members celebrate collective bargaining for 7,000 library, supervisory workers

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Following the end of Maryland’s legislative session, labor union members have praised the passage of collective bargaining rights for state supervisory employees and public library workers.

But while bills for collective bargaining for supervisors and library employees didn’t receive the opposition they did last year, a yearslong push for bargaining rights for graduate assistants — which has faced powerful resistance from the University System of Maryland — didn’t gain any traction.

Leaders and members representing six unions, led by the Maryland State and D.C. AFL-CIO, in February pushed for a “unified Maryland labor movement” and called for the state to extend union rights to all public-sector workers.

More than 7,000 state workers will gain the right to unionize later this year, which AFSCME Maryland Council 3 — representing about 45,000 public employees — called the largest legislative expansion of collective bargaining rights in the last few decades.

AFSCME Maryland President Patrick Moran said in a statement that the policy changes will help the state “continue to recruit and retain public-sector workers who provide our communities with essential public services.”

State employees in supervisory roles have said that, without collective bargaining rights, they haven’t had a way to address workplace concerns or promote broader policy changes.

“Winning collective bargaining rights for all of us as state supervisors is not just about fair compensation; it’s also about acknowledging the invaluable contributions we make to keep our state services running,” Yolanda Downing, a correctional officer lieutenant at the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore, said in a statement.

Last year, the University System of Maryland lobbied against collective bargaining for supervisory and managerial employees, citing the “contravention of long-standing labor relations principles,” though they didn’t do so this year.

A spokesman for the USM wrote in an email Friday that this year’s bill didn’t pertain to higher education.

The USM has also opposed graduate assistants and their supporters in their years of advocacy for collective bargaining, with provosts saying the change would hinder relationships between facility and administrators and distract from other issues in higher education.

The USM and its leaders have said that “shared governance” has promoted faculty involvement in decisions about governance and academic freedom, salaries and budgets, decisions on administrators, athletics and other matters, Andy Clark, assistant vice chancellor of government relations, said in a previous statement.

But graduate workers, including full- and part-time faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate assistants, have said that “administration-controlled mechanisms” like shared governance aren’t a substitute for collective bargaining.

This year’s bill would have extended the right to nearly 23,000 school employees, according to the United Auto Workers, which graduate students at the University of Maryland have already started signing authorization cards to join.

The Maryland Association of Counties, which advocates for the state’s 23 counties and Baltimore City, last year contended that county governments, which partially pay for local library systems, would bear “potentially unsustainable” costs if lawmakers were to allow collective bargaining.

This year, though, MACo refrained from taking a position after determining the policy wouldn’t mandate that counties pay for costs that arise from negotiations between library managers and employees, resembling the laws governing negotiations with public schools.

Because collective bargaining rights in Maryland’s library systems differ from county to county, union members called for statewide consistency to ensure all library workers could advocate for pay increases, grievance processes, performance improvement plans and better paid leave policies, among other improvements to their working conditions.

Ellie Nelson, a part-time employee with Anne Arundel County Public Libraries, said in a statement that the bill’s passage is a “critical step towards ensuring the health and stability of our libraries in the long run.”