A Baltimore Brew reporter was ejected from a meeting of the union representing city solid waste workers after checking in at a staffed table at the door and identifying herself on a sign-in sheet as a member of the media and taking a seat.

She was told to leave by AFSCME Local 44 President Dorothy Bryant.

“I didn’t know we had a media person here. In fact, we do not want one,” said Bryant, who presided over the Saturday-before-Easter meeting.

“Why not?” an audience member called out.

“This is a membership meeting,” Bryant said. “You have to leave.”

Shortly afterwards, solid waste worker Stancil McNair emerged from AFSCME’s local headquarters on Bush Street angrily shaking his head.

“That’s just like what they do to us. Cutting people off. Not letting ’em talk or be heard,” he said to a group of co-workers gathered in the parking lot. “I told them we’re tired of that.”

Kenard Wallace, who has worked in sanitation since 1997, said kicking the press out of the room showed that union leaders had something to hide.

“If everything was on the up and up, they wouldn’t have had a problem with you sitting in on the meeting,”  he observed.

Union members, who said Bryant no longer works for the city, questioned afterwards how she could have been running the meeting.

Online records show that Bryant retired in March after 57 years as a phlebotomist with the city Health Department.

Bryant, who is listed on the union’s website as president, has not yet replied to a request from The Brew for comment. Union officials also did not reply to calls and emails.

Bargaining begins Tuesday

The incident occurred as tensions remain high in the wake of two sanitation worker deaths last year and so-far-unfulfilled promises to increase pay and correct hazardous working conditions.

Recently, workers have been blaming their plight not just on successive mayoral administrations but also on Local 44, which represents solid waste laborers, workers and drivers.

According to a printed update sheet on a table at Saturday’s meeting, the AFSCME bargaining team’s most recent session with the city took place on March 27.

“Our union provided almost all of our non-economic proposals to the city, including comprehensive language on health and safety,” the update said, noting that none of the management responses were provided in writing.

After the release of the FY26 budget earlier this month, the Scott administration is to begin bargaining with the union on “economic subjects, including wages.”

These sessions, according to the update, “are scheduled on April 22 and 23 at a location to be determined by the city.”

To Wallace, McNair and the others gathered in the parking lot, pay should have been increased years ago and the union should have made it happen.

Pushing back at a hearing last month, AFSCME Council 3 President Patrick Moran argued that the union has limited powers to fight for members due to Baltimore’s “broken bargaining process,” which prohibits strikes and does not include binding arbitration.

Employees in the parking lot weren’t buying it.

By allowing pay rates to languish, they charged, union leaders have colluded with the city to produce a system of hiring, route assignment and advancement that’s based more on cronyism and patronage than performance and seniority.

They questioned how the union could have allowed conditions in the solid waste yards – sweltering buildings, lack of cold water,  a “toxic” workplace environment – documented by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) before and after the August 2 death of sanitation worker Ronald Silver II.

“I want a whole new union”

Among the skeptics was Wallace.

“I really want a whole new union in there that’s independent from the city,” he told The Brew.

After nearly 30 years with the Department of Public Works, he said, he makes $27.27 per hour and has to work a second job, as a shuttle bus driver, to make ends meet.

Told that the union blames his low pay on City Hall, Wallace rolled his eyes. “They always pass the buck.”

Another dissatisfied worker was William Meade, a crew leader working out of DPW’s Kresson Street facility.

Meade said he planned to ask officials at the Saturday meeting how they’re using the dues money they collect from members – in his case, “$27 every two weeks.”

OIG Director Isabel Mercedes Cumming also tried to get that information from Local 44, but was told by their lawyer she has no jurisdiction to request it.

“Garbage is not what I am. It’s what I do. What they pay us – now that’s garbage”  William Meade.

Meade called sanitation workers’ pay miserable.

“It needs to at least keep up with inflation,” he exclaimed, and their hazard pay, which currently stands at 15 cents an hour, is “pretty much nothing.”

He said the dangers that sanitation workers face may mean nothing to the general public, but to him they are a daily trauma.

He recalled a laborer who worked under him whose use of a weed whacker about two years ago triggered a violent response from a man.

“The guy picked up the weed whacker, swung it around and busted him upside the head. You never read about that in the news, but that one still messes with me,” Meade said, recalling that he heard the worker later died.

Raising crews’ pay, he said, would go a long way toward recognizing the hazardous but essential service they perform for Baltimore residents and businesses.

“Garbage is not what I am. It’s what I do,” he said. “What they pay us – now that’s garbage.”