A labor dispute is brewing in the place some call Granola Park.
The workers who help maintain the nuclear-free, vegan-friendly, solar-powered city of Takoma Park say they’re being taken for granted. They’re digging their heels in to demand better wages, joining labor groups nationwide buoyed by employee shortages and aggrieved by the risks they were exposed to during the coronavirus pandemic.
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During lunch hour Wednesday, several dozen sanitation workers, library associates, gardeners and public works employees streamed past yard signs declaring that “All Are Welcome Here” and filed into a community center in the heart of the city where they labor, but largely can’t afford to live. With wages as low as $43,000, virtually none of them are able to buy the charming Victorian homes, which are valued at an average of $665,000.
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The workers gathered around makeshift tables to hear from union leaders, swap notes on news of strikes and labor action in other localities and gripe about the latest bump in consumer prices, which economists were calling the highest annual increase in 30 years.
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Their negotiations with the city over wage increases had broken down months ago. And as of this week, union leaders told members, city leaders showed no signs of budging.
Frustration mounted here in the hours before Takoma Park’s part-time city council voted to give future members full-time benefits and more money — from $10,000 to $24,000 annually — in keeping with recommendations of a task force aimed at encouraging residents from diverse, lower-income backgrounds to run for office. (Five out of seven current council members are White, compared to half of Takoma’s population.)
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To the city’s lowest-paid workers, the changes and their $335,000 annual price tag smacked of hypocrisy — or at the least, of a poor sense of timing.
Since July, AFSCME Local 3399, which represents 80 city employees, has been asking for a 5.4 percent pay increase — just enough to keep pace with surging inflation, said president Sean Hendley — and backdated hazard pay for front line employees. It would cost the city $270,000, a small fraction of the $17.4 million it received through the American Rescue Plan, workers noted. The city has stood by its offer of 1.8 percent, and after two failed mediation sessions in the fall, union leaders said officials were engaging in “bad faith negotiations.”
“It’s just unfair,” Anthony Anderson, 49, said at the union meeting Wednesday. At the start of the pandemic, when city officials and most Takoma residents retreated into their homes, sanitation workers like himself were out on the street, collecting trash and encountering strangers, often without adequate protection. They saw on the news that they were considered “essential workers,” and now, he said, they wanted wage increases that reflected that title — “essential.”
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Labor action has been surging in recent months, an outgrowth of what experts call the Great Resignation, which has given employees more leverage over their employers. In October, more than 25,000 workers went on strike, compared to an average of 10,000 in previous months, according to the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. In Maryland, school bus drivers in at least three counties went on strike to protest staffing shortages. In Fairfax County, Va., government workers rallied in support of an ordinance that would give them the right to negotiate their pay.
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“It’s more than about being appreciated. We were out there on the front line, just like first responders,” said Anderson, a father of two who lives in D.C. “People take us for granted just ’cause we’re sanitation.”
“What about all that — what was it called? ARPA funding?” a public works employee piped up beside him. “We never seen none of that.”
In March 2020, the city started offering hazard pay to certain employees, giving those in public works, for example, an extra $100 a week. Officials ended this program after four months, citing a lack of resources, but workers said the risks they faced persisted until this spring.
“The first thing when they got the ARPA money, they should have given some to the guys on the front line, the so-called heroes of last year,” said John Dudley, 46, a public works employee.
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About $3.1 million of Takoma’s ARPA dollars has already been spent on aid for low-income residents in the city, said city manager Jamal Fox. Lawmakers are considering the possibility of spending some of the remaining dollars on city workers, but that conversation will happen during the budget review process — and after a wage agreement is made, said Kate Stewart, the mayor.
The city is also launching now into its pay equity study and organization workforce assessment, held once every three years. The two studies will seek out feedback from workers, Stewart said, and are set to conclude in March 2022.
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“We value our city employees greatly,” Stewart said in an interview, emphasizing that when the city shut down certain functions during the pandemic, Takoma Park did not lay off workers who weren’t able to perform their jobs. “This has been a difficult time for everyone,” she added, referencing negotiations, “And we ask that union leaders continue with the mediation.”
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Once known as a working-class neighborhood with liberal values — in the 1980s, it boasted a socialist mayor with a habit of getting arrested at protests — Takoma has evolved in recent decades into an affluent community of 17,000, where the median household income is $84,000, and more than half of residents own their homes.
Phil Shapiro, 61, has been working as a computer assistant at the city’s library for 16 years. He earns $53,000 pretax, he said, which is just enough for him to support himself while renting a room in a house in Takoma. He pays for a storage unit, which recently increased its monthly fee by $40.
“I just have no idea where the money is going to come from,” Shapiro said at the union meeting, waving the invoice from the storage company in his hand. “At a certain point, this starts to impinge on your dignity.”
Workers have a contract with the city that bars them from striking until officials reject the decision of an independent arbitrator, which is several steps down the line. For now, Hendley told members, the union is focusing on getting the city’s liberal crowd to exert pressure on elected officials. Union leaders have begun flyering at the weekend farmers market and reaching out to Washington power players with connections to the national labor movement, Hendley said.
Some in the room wanted to do more.
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“All this back-and-forth, and all this ring-around-a-rosie stuff — it’s enough!” said Marcini McWatt, 46. “I’m tired, man.”
Surrounded by other public works employees, McWatt asked whether a protest or a rally was possible, even if a strike wasn’t. He was willing to spend his lunch hour picketing outside the city council building, he said. Others around him murmured in agreement. They fixed roads, repaired street signs and plowed snow. Even before the pandemic, they hadn’t felt fairly compensated.
Late Wednesday evening, the city council voted unanimously to support the increase in wages and expansion of benefits for future members of their own body before entering a closed session to discuss the disagreements with the city’s union.
Meanwhile, McWatt, an 18-year employee of the city, returned to his home in District Heights, where he lived with his wife and two children, 15 and 20. There was an unpaid gas bill on the table he didn’t know how he was going to afford. And he knew, from working outdoors all day, that the weather was getting cold.