rich 1.0 Action Network https://actionnetwork.org <link href='https://actionnetwork.org/css/style-embed-v3.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' /><script src='https://actionnetwork.org/widgets/v6/letter/support-sb09hb486-higher-education-consolidated-bargaining?format=js&source=widget'></script><div id='can-letter-area-support-sb09hb486-higher-education-consolidated-bargaining' style='width: 100%'><!-- this div is the target for our HTML insertion --></div> AFSCME Council 3 https://actionnetwork.org/groups/afscme-council-3 https://can2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/letters/photos/000/152/963/normal/AFSCME_3_2021_Legislative_Agenda.png AFSCME Council 3 represents 6,500 higher education employees and over 20,000 regular state employees. For state employees, despite wide differences in job duties, we have one contract. But under the current system in higher education, we negotiate 15 different contracts with each individual campus within the University System of Maryland, even though jobs are very similar from campus to campus. This is an inefficient system preventing comprehensive work policies and perpetuating divisions on campus leading to vastly different experiences for frontline workers. Furthermore, with individual campuses, we can only negotiate non-wage issues, which in turn can be rejected by the USM Board of Regents. Even then, many individual campuses have declined to negotiate non-wage issues, including health and safety issues during a pandemic. COVID-19 doesn’t care which campus it hits! That's why this legislation is urgently needed to make sure each campus has a detailed and unified response to the pandemic to keep frontline staff safe. https://actionnetwork.org/letters/support-sb09hb486-higher-education-consolidated-bargaining