The guards who provide security around Harbor East are looking to unionize, citing unsafe working conditions. And they’re getting support from city hall and elsewhere.
Baltimore City Council President Jack Young introduced a resolution in the council last month supporting the officers, who work for Brantley security.
“I think it’s a constitutional right of workers to unionize if that’s what they so choose,” Young said.
The guards also are getting support from the Baltimore City chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The Rev. C.D. Witherspoon, the chapter president, had harsh words for Brantley.
“In my opinion, they appear to be slum employers,” he said. “If they are OK with appearing that way, then that’s their business.”
Witherspoon says the officers are being treated inhumanely adding they deserve to work in a fair and healthy environment and be treated with dignity and respect.
The guards, who work 12 hour shifts, say they are required to stand in one place for at least three of those hours. And that included times last winter when temperatures were dangerously cold.
“Some officers, I saw them stand inside of the stores on retail, but still with the door open and you still have to go back out there,” says David Carter, who has worked for Brantley for the last five months, “It’s not keeping you warm, it just make it worst.”
Young said he has heard similar stories about appalling working conditions from other employees. “[The employee] said that when she went out on maternity leave, there was no benefits for her,” he said..
The officers began working with 32 BJ, a regional arm of the Service Employees International Union about a year ago. They delivered a petition seeking union representation, with the signatures of more than half the officers, to Brantley’s Project Manager Glenn Fuller at the end of March.
Carter and others say Fuller accepted it at first, but later changed his mind, saying it was not the right thing for the company, and threw petition into the trash.
“That right there showed me, showed my co-workers, showed everyone that he didn’t care about our right to speak; he didn’t care what we wanted and he felt as though it was trash,” Carter said.
Jason Dagostino, Brantley’s Regional Vice President referred questions to the company’s corporate office in Nashville. Corporate spokesman Jim Burnett failed to return repeated calls for comment.
Young has scheduled a hearing, which will be broadcast on TV25, the city’s public access channel, at 5 p.m. May 14 at City Hall. He said he hopes the company will send a representative.