Unionized Baltimore city workers suffer hundreds of unsafe job conditions

Boarded up houses and vacant lots are a known problem in Baltimore. Added to that are new revelations about horrific working conditions for many of the city's workers. | Patrick Semansky/AP

BALTIMORE—No air conditioning in buildings in the summer. No heat in the winter. Many sinks are broken and others lack cold water. Garbage trucks with no air conditioning, are in the middle of a record heat wave.  No water or Gatorade for dehydrated workers. Toilet paper for the men’s room only if you ask for it because the paper container is broken. Pest infestations.

And working in one building on Baltimore’s Falls Road that seems literally on the verge of collapse. Nineteen of the 60 maintenance workers who use it reported on-the-job illnesses or injuries, too.

Welcome to the god-awful environment employees of the Baltimore Department of Public Works toil under, says their union, the City Union of Baltimore, AFT Local 800, along with the department’s Inspector General.

And the city has done nothing about it, despite four on-the-job deaths, at least six injuries and despite being cited by the state for safety and health violations 336 times from 2012-2022, a report two years ago from the union reveals. No wonder the union entitled its study Unsafe and Unprotected.

“The mayor repeatedly suggested Baltimore is in its renaissance,” Antoinette Ryan-Johnson, president of the 8,000-member local, said. “There can be no renaissance of the city if the workers who make the city run aren’t sufficiently supported with healthy and safe environments to work.”

Designs for major repairs and building replacements will be ready next year, with construction to start the year after that, Mayor Brandon Scott says. He plans to allot $20 million for the projects.

That doesn’t sit well with Ryan-Johnson. Her local blew the whistle on the problems in its own report exactly two years ago. It surveyed 842 members and received 146 replies. Of those, 58% said they got no safety and health training at all.

And the awful numbers showing how the city has fallen down on the job of protecting its workers are backed by individual stories, first in the union’s report and then, this July, by the Public Works Department’s own Inspector General, in interviews with WJZ-TV and the Baltimore Banner.

While the Inspector General’s findings “echo the work” of the union, the IG didn’t address the worst case in the report: A highway maintenance building on Falls Road that “has the potential for collapse.”

“Reading the Office of Inspector General’s report, I am disturbed that rather than addressing the issues at DPW facilities, the [department] Director is engaging in a back-and-forth about which faucets work correctly and which ones do not,” Ryan-Johnson said after the IG released her findings.

“The update to the OIG’s report produced July 23 should suggest to the public and affirm to us that Baltimore refuses to address infrastructural flaws at worksites across the city.

Not the only agency

“While the OIG’s report focuses on Department of Public Works facilities, we found DPW is not the only agency with unacceptable bordering on inhumane work conditions. The recent heat wave only exacerbated the challenges our members face going to work.”

The worst case, the union study said, was the 2601 Falls Road building for highway maintenance workers, despite three state safety and health inspections in 2012-2022, finding a total of 15 different violations.

“The conditions at this location are deplorable. The work areas are not properly illuminated and presumed asbestos ceilings are collapsing directly above employee work areas. Break rooms are unsanitary, and evidence of a pest infestation is visible. To make matters worse, the roof is collapsing, and the structural walls leaning, indicating the potential for collapse.

“On-the-job injuries are also of concern. There are 60 employees at Falls Road. During 2021, 19 (32%) reported significant workplace injuries that resulted in days away from work.”

“While any type of violation” across DPW “is cause for concern, there are certain violations that have been repeated more than others,” the union said. Baltimore did not “comply with” state “electrical, fire protection, and hazard communication standards on 37 occasions” in the years the report covers.

“Ensuring workers and the public are protected from electrocution, fire, and hazardous chemicals in city-operated buildings and facilities is a basic tenet of life safety,” the report states, deadpan.

Workers also came to union probers Audra Lucas and Diana Quintanilla with horror stories. Workers were identified only by job titles, to protect them from retribution.

DPW’s water meter technicians seemed to be particularly vulnerable to workplace hazards. One veteran meter reader said in all his years on the job, he had only “about an hour” of training in working in confined spaces, and that happened once, early. Meter readers are supposed to work in pairs, with one on the surface monitoring the other descending below. Often, the “monitor” has to report to another site, leaving the “reader” in a confined space, alone, checking wiring.

“Furthermore, there are no atmosphere checks, ventilators, or respirators for these workers,” the union report said. Lack of respirators turned out to be a common problem across DPW workplaces. “Rescue tripods, fall protection harnesses, barrier gates, and ventilation systems, are the equipment that the technicians mentioned would make the job safer but they do not have access to.

The union walked around on six trips to the field with the meter techs two years ago. Besides the lack of harnesses, it found that “ladders these employees are issued are not weight-appropriate, so they are unable to use them and oftentimes just climb into the manholes and climb back out, with many employees suffering back, shoulder, and wrist problems.”

And without the harnesses, tripods, and retrieval lines, “employees resorted to building their own tools out of everyday materials to make the jobs easier and safer…Employees mentioned the main issue is management not being accountable for the safety of employees.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Press Associates

Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.