Add your name: Maryland Public Workers deserve the Right to Strike!
Maryland General Assembly Members
Years of underfunding public services, budget cuts, and escalating austerity have eroded the basic quality of life in our cities and localities. Instead of fighting for us, our leaders make preemptive cuts, and voluntary concessions in the face of threats from the Far Right and their rich and powerful allies.
In this context, it is public workers and the communities they serve who must defend the public good. Our most powerful tool to do so is our right to strike. Without it, we public servants can't ensure we have the working conditions we need to do right by those we serve. Our working conditions are the public's living conditions. We are tired of making do with less and less. We demand the right to strike in order to ensure a quality of life for all.
Additional Sponsors
To:
Maryland General Assembly Members
From:
[Your Name]
Maryland’s public employees are the backbone of our communities. They teach our children, repair our roads, drive our buses, and so much more. Public employees need to have the appropriate supplies, staffing, working conditions and pay to get their jobs done right. Without these critical investments, vacancies rise, public services crumble, and our communities suffer the consequences.
Today, Democrats in Annapolis are considering imposing cuts that would walk back essential promises made to our communities like affordable public colleges, manageable caseloads and class sizes for teachers, and expanded public transit. Instead of asking the wealthiest to contribute their fair share, our leadership is asking the rest of us to make do with less.
Around the country, public workers are defending their communities from disinvestment. But in Maryland, the public sector does not have a legal right to strike. Corporations and political leadership have worked together not only to decimate our private sector unions, but also weaken the public sector unions that remain. Without this basic right, our public workers (who are mostly women and people of color) cannot effectively stand and fight to maintain the services that we all deserve.
By signing on to this letter, we stand with public sector workers in the removal of no-strike clauses from the Maryland State Code and from union contracts.
In the past, Maryland politicians have protected striking employees and prevented retaliation against them. They listened to what our public servants needed in order to do their jobs well and refused to let public servants be punished unfairly for speaking up.
Today, we call on the public and our elected leaders, at the local and state level, to both repeal the ban on public workers’ right to strike, and also to oppose any retaliation against public sector workers in the event of a strike before that ban is repealed.
We, the undersigned, understand that public workers are our best defenders of the public good, and we proudly support our public sector workers in their right to strike in order to defend and improve the quality of life in our communities.