Rally unites AFT affiliates for common cause

Fund Public Services! was the rallying call of several hundred union members who marched at the state Capitol in Annapolis, Md., this spring as lawmakers crafted the fiscal year 2005 budget.

AFT Public Employees affiliates throughout the state representing municipal, county and state employees were joined by AFT-represented healthcare workers and teachers for the lively rally in support of state and local public services—and employees.

“Maryland works because public employees do,” said Lorretta Johnson, president of AFT-Maryland. “Without adequate funding of public services, the health, safety and future of our citizens are at risk.”

Like most states and localities across the country, funding for public services, including worker wages and benefits, has been cut throughout Maryland due to budget shortfalls.

While union members rallied outside the Capitol, proposals were pending in the General Assembly that AFT members unionwide could relate to: a pending budget that slashes spending on programs and employees by $67 million.

“The Maryland Professional Employees Council represents 5,000 professionals who have not had a raise in three years,” George Myers, president of the AFT Public Employees affiliate, told the crowd. “For two-and-a-half years, there has been a hiring freeze. We are trying to give the citizens of Maryland the same quality of services, but we can’t without adequate funding.”

Cutting public services and public employees is not the way to build a better Maryland, Fred Mason Jr., president of the Maryland State and District of Columbia AFL-CIO, told the rally-goers and onlookers. A “stable and sustainable flow of revenue [will] build the state,” he said.

“We are all in this together,” Marietta English, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union/AFT, told the crowd. “This is about labor. The attack is on all of us.”

The rally was organized as part of the 2004 AFT Public Employees mobilization training. This annual meeting of organizers and activists from public employee affiliates across the country is an intensive hands-on training in building organizational structure through such mobilizing tactics as house calls, phone-banking, coalition-building and media outreach.