Unite Here Local 7 (Unite Here), the union that represents subcontracted dining workers on Homewood Campus, held a rally at the Inner Harbor on Thursday, Oct. 19 after a recent contract negotiation on behalf of workers at Horseshoe Baltimore, a casino near Camden Yards.
Under their previous contract, non-tipped employees at Horseshoe earned a minimum of $9.25 an hour, while employees such as table game dealers whose wages include tips earned as little as $3.75 an hour.
The new contract will increase the wages of tipped employees by 10 percent this month. By October 2021, tipped employees will earn at least $7.90 an hour, and non-tipped employees will earn a minimum of $14.67 an hour.
The rally was part of the Unite Here: Union Day of Action!, in which subcontracted workers in 40 cities around the U.S. and Canada gathered to express their dissatisfaction with wages and benefit plans of big corporations.
Gladys Burrell, who retired last spring after working in Hopkins dining facilities for 46 years, attended the rally. She said that she continued to work as the financial secretary of Unite Here over the summer but recently retired.
Burrell, who was widely known by students as “Mrs. Gladys,” said that she still attended the union’s events because she wants to support the fight for subcontracted workers.
“There’s so many people out here who need our help who don’t have any help to turn to. They need our fight, so the harder we fight the better off some of those people will be,” she said. “It might not take a day or even a year, but as long as you keep fighting you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
According to Burrell, low wages for workers make it hard for them to get out of poverty and become members of the middle class. She said that things like property taxes and health insurance are challenges for many workers because they often do not earn enough to make ends meet and receive no health benefits from their job contracts.
She said that Unite Here was fighting so that subcontracted workers can escape poverty.
“We want to have a nice home for our children,” she said. “People have to work two or three jobs just to try and make ends meet, so by the time you’ve done those two or three jobs you don’t have energy for anything. We want them to have a decent wage so that they can work one job and be home with their family too.”
Alberta Palmer, an organizer with Unite Here, said that the rally followed national demonstrations on behalf of groups like women and immigrants and was a response to attacks by the Trump administration on workers.
She added that the food service and hospitality industry is worth about $180 billion dollars.
“For this to be a big, money-making business, we still have workers making minimum wage, we still have workers making $11 an hour, we still have workers that can’t afford good health insurance,” she said.
While Unite Here did not organize the rally to celebrate their newly negotiated contract on behalf of the workers at Horseshoe Casino, Palmer said that it was a good opportunity to make the announcement.
She added that they wanted to demonstrate the power of the union and show other companies employing subcontracted workers that they were able to successfully negotiate with a large corporation like the casino.
“They can pay better wages, they can create a better working environment, they can afford to give workers great health insurance and we have to make that demand on [other] corporations,” Palmer said. “The Horseshoe had no business paying people minimum wage. We had no business fighting for two years to get the little that we did.”
Palmer also referenced prospective employers like Amazon, which is considering Baltimore along with several other cities to be the home of its second headquarters.
She said that the union wants the City to set a standard regarding worker contracts at prospective companies. The demonstrators marched from Inner Harbor to City Hall.
“The question is not what we can do for them. The question is what can these corporations do for the citizens of Baltimore,” she said. “Are they going to come in here and create good jobs, or are they going to come in here and work our citizens like they’re slaves?”
Though Unite Here has worked with some local organizations, Palmer said that in the future they hope that more corporations will encourage workers to attend the rallies to increase community engagement.
Burrell said that while the union is fighting now to set a standard for employers and ensure future success in contract negotiations, having a successful rally depends on the number of supporters.
She encouraged more workers and community members to demonstrate to help workers be heard.
“If you don’t fight for what you want you’ll take anything anybody gives you,” Burrell said. “You need to be better than that, and you’re worth more than that.”
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