Baltimore City civil rights leaders and labor unions rallied outside the Cherry Hill Reedbird sanitation yard on Wednesday, demanding further accountability from the city’s Department of Public Works.
The rally came nearly four weeks after Ronald Silver II died of heat exhaustion while collecting city trash on a day the heat index hovered around 105 degrees. His death came weeks after a series of investigative reports from the Baltimore City Office of the Inspector General revealed “subhuman” conditions across agency facilities, especially at Reedbird, including a lack of air conditioning and accessible fluids like water and Gatorade.
“Accountability means many things, and that includes the termination and or reassignment of persons who were complicit, who had a fundamental obligation to supervise… to implement change, and were derelict in their duties,” explained Linda Batts, a retired federal employee who also worked briefly doing equity work for DPW.
Batts, among others, also called for federal oversight and investigations from agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (the Maryland Occupational Safety and Health administration is investigating Silver’s death, according to city officials).
In order to keep workers safe during the Code Red Heat Advisory on Wednesday, the city announced it would monitor conditions and potentially pull crews off their routes early if heat became too extreme.
According to a source with AFSCME 3, the union that represents the majority of local municipal workers, the city and union decided together to pull sanitation crews off their routes in the early afternoon as temperatures began to soar.
City officials have not confirmed that detail, nor will they share what metrics were used to determine whether to recall workers on future extreme heat days.
In a written statement DPW spokesperson Mary Stewart said “the action is not a permanent benchmark of our operations” but that Baltimore City is responsible to take “proactive measures to safeguard our staff.”
“The effort by our outside firm to assess and review our standard policies and procedures is still underway and, once that assessment is complete, we will work with them, the union, and all other relevant stakeholders to outline any necessary changes to our approach,” Stewart went on to write. The “outside firm” is Conn, Maciel, Carey, a DC-based law firm the city says it has hired to help create heat safety policies. The decision came under fire during a City Council hearing last week after council members learned about the firm’s history of advocating against OSHA occupational heat standard proposals.
“In the meantime, we will continue to adjust as needed and take necessary precautions like today’s announcement,” said Stewart.
Organizers pushed ahead with Wednesday’s rally, despite the heat, telling WYPR that it was “nothing” compared to what sanitation workers face every day.
“It's 130 degrees behind that truck, with that heat coming off that garbage,” said Jerry Emmons, a former laborer and yard superintendent. He described dealing with management who were apathetic or hostile to sick employees and those who had experienced violence while on the job. Emmons also recalled trying to escalate concerns about environmental hazards and pollutants at the sanitation yards but management ignored him, he said.
Michael Stanley is a DPW laborer and AFSCME union steward who stopped by the rally after his shift. He thinks all city workers, across all agencies, need to make noise about their conditions.
“Until we start banding together, it's always going to be the same,” he said. Stanley says that in his years of working for DPW, he has never received training on heat sickness awareness or prevention.
During the rally, AFSCME distributed a list of demands.
They include demands to:
- Immediately adopt the proposed Maryland standard on heat safety and prevention
- Management must include the union in creating all emergency action plans and regular safety policy developments
- Involve the union in all workplace injury, fatality, and “near-miss” investigations
- The city must revise its existing workplace violence prevention plans and provide all workers updated training on CPR, “stop the bleed”, heat exposure, and stop work authority.