Resistance to a Backlash: Maryland Public Employees On Strike, 1968-1974
Articles
Resistance to a Backlash: Maryland Public Employees On Strike, 1968-1974
Articles

Resistance to a Backlash: Maryland Public Employees On Strike, 1968-1974

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Emily Fox argues that a series of illegal strikes by Maryland state public employees between 1968 and 1974 provide key historical insight into the rise and fall of militant public sector unionism in the United States.

Picketers during the 1970 Garrett County, Maryland Road Workers Strike. (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

Introduction

In 1935, employees of private companies in the US won the right to strike as part of a set of collective bargaining rights granted through the Wagner Act. Yet public employees across the country were denied that same basic labor right. Today, elected officials are completely within their rights to fire and replace people picking up garbage, fixing state roads, working in state hospitals, conducting public transit, and providing public services for the state if they choose to go on strike. 

But in 1968, sanitation workers in Baltimore went on strike anyway, defying the mayor’s threat to fire them and disqualify their union from a recognition election. After just four days on strike, not only did AFSCME Local 44 end up winning union recognition, but they also won an increase in wages. When the Baltimore legislature passed a bill granting collective bargaining rights for city employees, public unions were confident that the no-strike clause included in the bill was meaningless. Robert Hastings, a representative from AFSCME international, said about the Baltimore law with certainty, “The fiat on the right to strike will not stop one.”1  

Hastings was wrong. Without legal protections for public employees on strike, elected officials were able to get away with firing workers and punishing unions once the political context changed. In 1968, AFSCME Local 44 owed their success to the civil rights movement and the way they connected the demands of sanitation workers to racial justice. However, by the mid-1970s, the civil rights movement was nowhere near as strong. Conservatives had created an atmosphere, facilitated by the fiscal crisis and racial division, that was hostile to both public provision of services and public employees. The loss experienced by Baltimore striking public sector workers in 1974 is emblematic of this backlash.

Until recently, the history of public employee organizing has been largely ignored by scholars, particularly the history of public employees in Maryland.2 However, historians are beginning to take notice. In 2021, a historian Jane Berger published the book A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement, which focuses on AFSCME’s representation of African American workers in Baltimore and their collaboration with Black civil rights groups. She aptly shows how AFSCME’s large Black membership, and its association with both civil rights unrest and government spending on public services made their union specifically a target for the conservative, racialized backlash in the mid 1970s.3 

This article charts the development of public employee organizing and the backlash to it in Maryland during the years 1968 to 1974. It begins with the sanitation strike in 1968, which demonstrates the immense success Maryland public employees experienced through their collaboration with the civil rights movement. Then, I describe the failed Baltimore municipal strike of 1974, and analyze how it was associated with the national backlash against public services and public employees. I argue that the success of public employee unions in Maryland greatly depended on the surrounding political context. Finally, I discuss the Garrett County Workers strike of 1970. Largely forgotten until recently, it was the longest public employee strike in US history, and demonstrates an example of how Maryland workers across urban-rural and racial divides united in the face of a hostile political context. 

Sanitation Workers in Baltimore: 1968 

Maryland public sector workers’ first ever successful strike was in April 1968. Almost two thousand municipal sanitation and sewer workers walked off the job, demanding higher wages and union recognition with AFSCME Local 44, the union for Baltimore city workers. This strike represents the immunity public sector unions felt to laws prohibiting strikes in the 1960s, and sparked the public employee union movement in Maryland. The story also shows how crucial the civil rights movement was to securing wins for public sector workers by defining the strike as a racial issue. 

Baltimore’s last experience with a strike had been in 1953, when sanitation workers, school janitors, street cleaners, and other manual workers stayed home from work for fifteen days. Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. refused to concede to their union’s demands and threatened to fire the workers if they did not end their strike. The strikers retreated, returning to their work, and their affiliate union at the time, the Teamsters, lost their certification. With that, the mayor successfully broke the strike. For the more than 10 years that followed, there was no strike activity. It wasn’t until 1964 when AFSCME started organizing city workers that a strike again became possible.4

In 1968, the Mayor of Baltimore was Thomas D’Alesandro III, the son of D’Alesandro Jr.. On the first day of the sanitation workers’ strike on September 5, 1968, he used the same strategies his father had. He threatened to disqualify AFSCME from a future union election, suspended dues check-off for members of the union, and issued an injunction against the workers, and he threatened to arrest the leaders of the strike. This time, the striking workers would not back down, even as the streets filled with garbage. Instead of returning to work, garbage collectors picketed city hall with signs that read, “Injunctions don’t collect garbage,” and threatened to escalate the strike by including workers from other city departments.5 One day later, 300 sewer workers and 150 highway workers joined the strike. The number of employees on the picket line reached 1,750.6 A majority of the workers were African American. Like the famous strike in Memphis, sanitation workers carried signs saying “I Am a Man,” showing that they were not simply after higher wages, but also dignity and respect.7

At the time, AFSCME was working closely with civil rights groups across the country, who saw the connection between economic inequality in the US and racial injustice. Just three months before the ‘68 strike in Baltimore, the Poor People’s Campaign, which was organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), held a rally in Washington D.C. and encouraged members of AFSCME nationwide to go on strike. “You can stop this city if you want to. You have the power,” said Rev. Andrew Young, then executive director of the SCLC, to a crowd of African American union members.8

Ernest Crofoot, the Executive Director of AFSCME Council 67, the association of Maryland county and municipal unions, and Jerry Wurf, the president of AFSCME’s international union attended the rally and took that message to Baltimore.9 And, stop the city they did. Three months later, almost 2,000 workers were on strike and the streets of Baltimore were piled with uncollected, rotting garbage. When the mayor and his associate met with striking workers at City Hall, they proposed that the sanitation workers go back to work and “give the Mayor a chance to give you justice.” The city officials had to leave the room quickly after the crowd of striking sanitation workers shouted them down.10

While the workers were militant and devoted to their cause, what ultimately won the strike for AFSCME in 1968 was their ability to link their struggle to the civil rights movement. The mayor sought to define the strike as solely an union recognition issue, but on September 7, two days into the strike, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and the Urban League, held a meeting and decided to come out in support of the strikers. The groups planned to fight the injunction in court, join the sanitation workers on the picket line, raise funds for the strikers and their families, and develop new strike tactics. The public support from civil rights groups lent broader overtones of racial justice to a strike that had previously appeared to be a question of economics and union jurisdiction.11

The two unions with whom AFSCME was competing at the time, the Laborer’s International Union (LIU) and Classified Municipal Employee Association (CMEA), had committed to crossing the picket line. However, after these unions learned of civil rights groups’ endorsement of the strikers, they reluctantly advised their members to stay home. The mayor also began to worry that his hardline response to the strike could harm his record on civil rights in an increasingly African American city.12 He frantically met with five civil rights leaders the next day in an effort to dispel what he called “racial overtones.” At a press conference, the city solicitor declared “race has no place in this issue. Unfortunately one of the unions injected race in an effort to support its cause.” In response, P. J. Ciampa, AFSCME Maryland’s Executive Director, remarked: “We have not injected a racial issue, we have taken the mask off it.”13

On the morning of September 9, the strike was over and the sanitation workers had won. City officials and union leaders had spent the entire night bargaining and the result was an agreement by the city to double the raise for city workers, restore dues-checkoff for AFSCME Local 44, and re-qualify them for the upcoming union election, which they would go on to win along with a collective bargaining bill. Members of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and civil rights leaders were also present at the negotiations and played a crucial role in serving as intermediaries between the rival unions and the city.14

Baltimore’s strike in 1968 was characteristic of the invincibility many public sector unions felt during that decade. After just four days on strike, Mayor D’Alesandro’s injunction, threat to fire the workers, and decertification of dues checkoff vanished into thin air. The attitude of public employee unions during this time can be summed up by Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO’s secretary treasurer, who announced at the time: “the only ‘illegal’ strike is an unsuccessful one by a very weak union.”15 Thus, union leaders were not worried that Baltimore’s municipal collective bargaining bill did not allow them the right to strike. 

Baltimore’s Changing Political Context: The 1974 Strike 

AFSCME’s invincibility to strike laws in the 1960s relied on a favorable political context, but this environment did not last. While their association with the civil rights movement helped them win their strike in 1968, it also placed a target on their back for conservatives. By the mid 1970s, they didn’t win strikes any more. As unemployment and inflation both increased, an increasing proportion of workers’ wages were diminished. As a result, public sector militancy in Baltimore and nationwide only increased. The number of US public employee strikes reached historic highs in the mid-1970s. In 1958, there were 15 government employee strikes in the US; by 1975, that number hit 478.9 While in 1968, it was politically risky for elected officials to take action against striking sanitation workers, public sector unions essentially became a political punching bag a decade later. The strikes launched by public sector unions in 1974 demonstrate the rapidly changing political atmosphere that public sector unions were forced to confront. 

Four months before AFSCME went on strike in 1974, members of the Public School Teachers Association (PTSA) and the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) launched a dramatic month-long strike. About 84% of Baltimore city’s students and teachers were absent from classes between February 3rd and March 5th, 1974, demanding an 11% raise, along with other grievances.16 The PTSA leadership was put under pressure to end the strike when the city hit the union with heavy fines. For every day the illegal strike continued, the PTSA was required to pay a whopping $15,000/day, as well as $1,000/day for its president Karl Boone. Afraid of the fines and for the future of its union, the PTSA leadership decided to undermine the members and end the strike with an agreement by the city to raise wages a mere 0.5%.17 Arthur Milburn, an athletic director at Edmondson high school who continued to strike, concisely summed up the feeling of the teachers: “I gave up so much for so little.”9 In August of that year, both BTU and PTSA would go on to lose collective bargaining rights due to their facilitation of the illegal strike.18 

AFSCME city employees were supportive of their fellow government workers throughout the teachers’ strike. They even threatened to take workers off the job in other sectors to put more pressure on the city government for the teachers’ wage demands. As Ernest Crofoot, an AFSCME official, explained, “If we get the same kind of offers from the city the teachers have, we may all be in the same bucket, real quick.”19 Indeed, later that year, the same meager raises that the teachers had won were presented to the city employees represented by AFSCME. The contracts were initially unanimously approved by 700 members of AFSCME Local 44. Despite this, a group of sanitation workers staged a wildcat strike in opposition to wage increases they deemed too low; the cost of living had risen by 10%, but they were being offered a 6% wage increase.20 

Initially when union members walked out on July 1, 1974, Raymond Clarke, president of AFSCME Local 44 and former sanitation worker, encouraged the strikers to return to work, as the union had already voted for the contract. Despite his intervention, the protests continued. Accusing their local president of selling out the members by agreeing to the contract, striking workers hung an effigy of Mr. Clarke. The union leadership quickly reversed its tact and held another vote on the contract. This time the contract was voted down. The local, state, and national AFSCME then came out in full endorsement of the strike.21

By July 9, 1974, nine days after the strike began, 3,000 city employees across departments were off the job, including highway workers, sewer workers, parks and recreation workers, and zookeepers.22 One group of state workers also on strike were 300 city jail guards, who left the inmates supervised by a skeleton crew of jail administrators. As a result, incarcerated people could not attend their trials at the city courts, and jail residents formed an “Inmates Council” to oppose the striking jail guards. On July 13, the Inmates’ Council filed a class action lawsuit against AFSCME Local 44 and the city government for violating their due process, neglecting their medical treatment, and leaving them in unsanitary conditions.23 One of the inmates, Vaughn Thomas, declared, “We can govern ourselves.”24 The next day, 84 people incarcerated in juvenile detention took four supervisors hostage and stole their keys, opening cell gates. State police were sent in to help quell the revolt, since the city police were also on strike.25 AFSCME Local 1195, the union for Baltimore police officers, had also rejected the city’s offer and walked off their jobs on July 12. The Baltimore Sun reported citywide looting and arson in the days that followed.

Finally, after fifteen dramatic days in Baltimore, leaders of AFSCME, under threat of imprisonment if the strike did not end, and city leaders agreed to give the workers a 19.25% raise over two years. Consequences for the two unions were severe, though. The police commissioner fired all of the striking officers, leaving the leadership of AFSCME Local 1195 permanently defunct. The city fined AFSCME Local 44 $90,000.26 Mayor Schaefer also maintained that he would cut jobs and public services to account for the wage increase. He promised that he would take a harsher stance in the future on illegal strikes.27 

Unlike 1968, civil rights groups were nowhere to be found at the negotiations. Instead, sanitation workers negotiated alongside the majority white police union. AFSCME leaders had insisted on this to ensure that raises were not unfairly distributed between their white and black members.28 However, this also meant they had lost this targeted political and racial angle that they once had, when the civil rights movement was still strong.  

Weeks later, the AFL-CIO withdrew their support for Governor Mandel’s re-election campaign for retaliating against striking AFSCME members in Baltimore. The governor called their bluff. He accused Jerry Wurf, who was becoming increasingly politically unpopular, of being “irresponsible,” and fired back that Wurf could “keep his support and his endorsement too.” Replacements for striking workers were already on the way.29 Later that year, Mandel won his re-election by a landslide, without AFSCME’s support. 

Anatomy of a Backlash 

The 1974 strike was not just a turning point for Baltimore state workers, but public sector unions nationwide. Conservatives used what happened in Baltimore to scaremonger about the havoc public unions would wreak on the country. The fiscal crisis and a federal response of budget cuts helped facilitate this backlash. Austerity that trickled down to the states meant allocation of the city budget was a zero-sum game, where public sector wages and services were pitted against taxpayer dollars.30 Conservatives also included public sector union strikes in their racialized, anti-Communist propaganda campaign about cracking down on welfare and urban crime. 

The fiscal crisis that started in the 1970s and the federal government’s response was a death-dealing blow to public unions. As Joseph McCartin has pointed out, while private employers who fired and replaced striking workers could be accused of placing profits ahead of worker’s rights, government officials could protect themselves from these accusations by claiming fiscal responsibility.31 State and local government budgets grew tight as the flow of  federal dollars decreased, and governors and mayors could argue that there was only so much money to go around when workers demanded wages consistent with the cost of living. Bringing up an increase in taxes to fund wage demands of striking workers was sure to alienate at least some of the public. Worse, conservatives blamed public sector unions for worsening “stagflation” — inflation and unemployment — by demanding higher wages, greedily prioritizing their own special interest above the interest of the economy.32 They were an easy scapegoat for politicians who wanted to shift the blame away from their own macroeconomic policies. 

The backlash was not just an economic one; it was a racial one as well. Most people have heard of the caricature of the “welfare queen,” a lazy, specifically African American woman who is using up taxpayer dollars to buy luxury items. On the other side of that were welfare providers, many of whom were also black women and who were represented by AFSCME in Baltimore.33 During the 1960s, civil rights organizers in Baltimore had prioritized moving African Americans into government employment, as they had just recently achieved more equitable hiring laws. As a result, AFSCME’s members in Baltimore were disproportionately Black and female.34 By 1970, half of Black male college graduates and more than 60 percent of college educated Black women were public employees, compared with 35 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women.35 Public employees were therefore included in the target groups for conservatives’ racialized scaremongering, alongside welfare recipients. 

The chaos that ensued in the 1974 municipal strike in Baltimore only played into the white middle class fears that conservatives had provoked. Spiro Agnew, the former governor of Maryland, was now the Vice President of the United States. He had run on a “tough on crime” campaign ripe with “dog whistle” politics that appealed to white Americans’ racial hatred. Known for his crackdown on city uprisings after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, he used his national prominence to characterize Baltimore as a violent and fearful city filled with African American derelicts and criminals.33 Seeing police officers and jail guards, normally the bastions of protection against these groups, walking off the job in Baltimore was perfect fodder for right-wingers who were looking for any chance they could to siphon white voters away from unions and the Democratic Party. Commercial looting, jail revolts, and rotting garbage in the streets confirmed the fears of the white middle and upper class. The workers they had once associated with Martin Luther King Jr were now associated with urban degeneration, criminal activities, and even revolutionary Communism. Elected officials, including in Baltimore, worried their cities would continue to be stripped of their tax base as white flight to the suburbs persisted. Allowing public unions to continue their militant actions and win illegal strikes did not help facilitate the perception of “law and order” that mayors wanted in order to keep white people in the city. 

Ralph de Toledano, the founder of the magazine National Review, was a leading crusader against public employee unions and the Democratic mayors who he claimed allowed AFSCME to “let our cities burn.”36 He used the 1974 strike in Baltimore specifically to stoke fears nationwide, publishing op-eds about AFSCME Maryland in places as far as Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he argued that Jerry Wurf was being influenced by revolutionary socialism. Asserting that public employee unions were “what Lenin called a ‘strategic minority,’” he argued that AFSCME’s strikes were impactful, “not only because its members are involved in a vital civil function but also because they can bring organized pressure on the level of political power.”9 AFSCME had become too powerful. Not only did they want to burn down cities, but they also wanted to take your tax dollars to advance socialism. 

During this time, AFSCME aimed to pass a National Public Employee Relations Act (NPERA), which would have created a collective bargaining framework similar to the NLRA for public sector workers.37 The 1974 strike, along with other chaotic strikes across the country, helped make AFSCME into a political pariah. Now, harsh treatment of public sector unions was an indication of an elected official’s commitment to fiscal responsibility, law and order, and anti-Communism. With that, the window of opportunity for public sector workers had closed. 

Garrett County Road Workers Strike of 1970 

The target audience for this backlash were people like the residents of Garrett County, Maryland. The westernmost county in Maryland, it was close to 100% white, overwhelmingly Republican, and cherished tradition and “family values.” It also happened to be the location of the longest public employee strike in US history. 

Road maintenance workers, who were members of the Garrett County Road Employees Association (GCREA), formed in 1957, approached AFSCME in 1969, one year after the sanitation workers’ strike in 1968.38 Many of the road workers were eligible for food stamps and public assistance despite their status as public employees. Though they worked alongside state employees, the salaries the county men received were drastically lower.39 Seeing a connection between the struggles of the sanitation workers and their own, they believed their prospects to improve workplace conditions with professional organizers and negotiators from AFSCME would be better. Though they already had their own union, they launched a campaign to affiliate as AFSCME Local 1834. However, two out of the three Republican county commissioners refused to recognize AFSCME: Hubert Friend and Ross Sines.40 

Though the county had previously recognized the GCREA, they refused to recognize AFSCME, arguing that they were protecting Garrett County from the “outside influence” of union bureaucracy in Baltimore and Washington.9 When AFSCME in Baltimore planned a car caravan on June 6th, 1970 to express support and deliver food to striking workers, some residents were upset by the appearance of African Americans in Garrett County. The area was close to entirely white. The county commissioners of the strike tried to use AFSCME’s association with Black Baltimoreans against the Garrett County road workers.41 Mr. Sines, one of the anti-union commissioners, told a reporter at one point, “Put in your paper there was colored here,” referring to the black AFSCME officials who came to support the strikers.42 He was aiming to stoke racial resentment to lose the workers sympathy from the public. 

The road workers faced stiff opposition from the commissioners, who fired them all two weeks after the strike began in April. Regardless, they were militantly devoted to their cause. Their strike had a 100% participation rate. Even the 5 out of 139 workers who were not union members, stayed home from work.43

Militancy only grew. In June, after two months on strike, the road workers began setting off dynamite at the anti-union county commissioners’ homes. They also bombed the roads, aiming to exacerbate the need for their own re-employment.44 When non-union employees were brought in to replace the striking workers in August 1970, there was a tense face-off between two huge crowds of men. Union members carried bats, whittled sticks, and another brought a .22 revolver. The local union president said of the confrontation, “You ever see a bunch of wild hillbillies? Well, you are going to see some this morning.”45 Fearing violence, the commissioners backed down on sending replacements temporarily.9

For more than seven months, the anti-union commissioners never backed down, maintaining that Garrett County residents were opposed to AFSCME and opposed to the strike. But in the elections in the fall of 1970, Garrett County residents voted them out.46 The new commissioners, all three Democrats, recognized AFSCME immediately and gave the striking workers their jobs back.47 The election of these Democrats was unique for Garrett County, which has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since the Civil War.48 

This strike is not just significant because it was the longest public employee strike in US history. Garrett County residents were the kinds of people the conservatives who facilitated the backlash to public employee unions tried to appeal to. Instead of being scared away by public employee strikes in Baltimore, Garrett County residents saw connections between the problems faced by the Baltimore sanitation workers and their own. As an open letter written by the Garrett workers union declared in response to their opposition, “Hitler’s tactics will not work in this day and—we’ll prove it to you on election day, September 15… We resent your implications that we are simple-minded folk. We know what is going on in today’s world. It is people like you, Commissioners Sines and Friend and the mere handful of your misguided, non-thinking followers who are behind the times—way, way behind.”49

Conclusion 

In 1968, one of the main reasons public employees were able to win illegal strikes was because the civil rights movement was still strong. They worked closely with racial equity groups when sanitation workers went on strike, and elected officials worried that firing and replacing their workers could result in political fallout. But by 1974, the civil rights movement had declined, and conservatives were able to use the chaotic events of that year’s strike to associate public employee unions with urban crime. The fiscal crisis only furthered an atmosphere of scarcity that was ripe for racial animosity and anti-Communist scaremongering. 

The story of the Garrett County strike is important to tell as an example of when attempts at racial scaremongering failed and class solidarity prevailed. Conservatives used the atmosphere of scarcity to push propaganda which claimed that if Black people’s material conditions were improving, then whites must be losing. Garrett County workers refused to play in the racial zero sum game and saw how everyone could benefit from workers’ rights and public services. Their story shows that an alternative was available to the backlash: class solidarity, which trumped racialized fear mongering. 

Until recently, the 1970 Garrett County road workers strike had been largely forgotten, even though it was the longest lasting public employee strike in US history. In July 2021, the first commemoration of the strike took place, after residents of Garrett County petitioned the state for almost a decade to put up a historical road marker. One of the people who was crucial to bringing this history back to light was Len Shindel, a Garrett county resident and longtime union activist. In the Garrett County Republican story covering the marker’s commencement ceremony he was quoted as saying, “Let’s never forget the precious truths they left us with — that the only way to improve the lives of working families is to support one another and to defeat those who would manipulate us into hating on other working people. That is how we will honor their legacy.”50

 

 

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  1. Robert Erlandson, “Election Bill Is Opposed by 2 Unions,” Baltimore Sun (September 12, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88676413/.
  2. Joseph A. McCartin, “Bringing the State’s Workers in: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced US Labor Historiography,” Labor History 47, no. 1 (February 2006): 73–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/00236560500385934.
  3. Jane Berger, A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
  4. A.W. Geiselman, “Trash Strike of 1953 Lasted Fifteen Days,” Evening Sun, (September 5, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/image/370679245/?terms=strike%201953&match=1.
  5. “Job-Return Proposal Is Shouted Down by Workers,” Evening Sun (September 5, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88466711/the-evening-sun/.
  6. Robert Erlandson A, “Number Of Employees Idle Reaches 1,750 As Negotiations Deadlock,” Baltimore Sun (September 6, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88466953/the-baltimore-sun/.
  7. “Strikers Win Sanitation Pact in Baltimore,” AFL-CIO News ( September 14, 1968), archive.org/details/mdu-labor-026273/page/n345/mode/2up.
  8. Alvin Sanoff, “Leaders of Poor Call for Strikes,” Baltimore Sun (June 28, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/72813712/added-to-outline/.
  9. Ibid.
  10. “Job-Return Proposal Is Shouted Down by Workers,” The Evening Sun (September 5, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88466711/the-evening-sun/.
  11. Stephen Lynton, “Rights Heads Back Strike,” Baltimore Sun (September 7, 1968), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/90530710/.
  12. Jane Berger, “‘There Is Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs:’ Privatization and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71, no. 1 (2007): 29–49.
  13.  John O’Donnell, “Strike Leaders, Mayor Agree to Meet Today on Trash Men’s Wages,” Baltimore Sun (September 8, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/90531702/.
  14. John O’Donnell, “Union Leaders, City Hold Talks On Sanitation Strike,” Baltimore Sun, September 9, 1968, https://baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88530390/.
  15. J. A. McCartin, “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970-1976,” Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (June 1, 2008): 123–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/25095467.
  16. Mike Bowler, “Break in Strike Hinted after Mandel School Talks,” Baltimore Sun (February 15, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88643705/; Larry Carson and Sue Miller, “TEACHERS REJECT CONTRACT: 4-Week City Walkout Continues,” Baltimore Sun (March 4, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88644285/.
  17. Larry Carson and Sue Miller, “CITY’S TEACHERS HALT WALKOUT,” Baltimore Sun( March 5, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88644375/.
  18. Antero Pietela, “Burch Says PSTA Lost Right to Bargain,” Baltimore Sun (August 17, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88644597/.
  19. Mike Bowler, “City Police Escort Teachers, Pupils Past Picket Lines on Strike’s 17th Day,” Baltimore Sun (February 21, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88644760/.
  20. “Police Slow Work Pace, Mock Rules,” Baltimore Sun (July 8, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88644958/.
  21. Robert Timberg and Dennis Bates, “Union Leaders Vote To Support Striking City Garbage Workers,” Baltimore Sun (July 2, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88645113/.
  22. Richard Cramer, “Mayor Stays Firm as City Strike Grows,” Baltimore Sun (July 9, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88646470/.
  23. Robert Erlandson, “City Jail Inmates Sue over Strike,” Baltimore Sun (July 13, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88646526/.
  24. Richard Cramer, “Strike Talks Lapse as City Obtains New Injunction,” Baltimore Sun (July 10, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88646643/.
  25. “Police Put Down Revolt of Youths in City Jail,” Baltimore Sun (July 14, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88646694/the-baltimore-sun/.
  26. Richard Cramer, “Trash Strike Ends with 19% Raise; Police Union Urges Return to Work,” Baltimore Sun (July 16, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88647990/.
  27. Robert Timberg and Alan Doelp, “Schaefer Urges Halt In Reprisals After Police Strike,” Baltimore Sun (July 19, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648067/the-evening-sun/.
  28. Richard Cramer and Tom Horton, “Union Sources Expect Pay Increase in City,” Baltimore Sun (July 15, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648156/.
  29. Anthony Barbieri, “Mandel Assails Wurf ,” Baltimore Sun (August 2, 1974), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648209/.
  30. Berger, “‘There Is Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs.’”
  31. J. A. McCartin, “‘Fire the Hell out of Them’: Sanitation Workers’ Struggles and the Normalization of the Striker Replacement Strategy in the 1970s,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 67–92.
  32. Ralph DeToledano, “Let Our Cities Burn – Part III: The Police Were Shouting ‘Scab.,’” Daily News [Bowling Green, KY], (October 29, 1975), news.google.com/newspapers?id=S78dAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yUYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4787%2C5085492.
  33. Berger, New Working Class.
  34. Berger, “‘Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs.’”
  35. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), 82.
  36. DeToledano, “Let Our Cities Burn – Part III.”
  37. J. A. McCartin, “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970-1976,” Journal of American History 95, no. 1 ( 2008): 123–48.
  38. Len Shindel, “Garrett County (Md.) Road Workers Strike of 1970,” Garrett Road Strike, accessed November 10, 2021, https://garrettroadstrike.com/glades/.
  39. David Ettlin, “Striking Garrett Employees Dismissed By County Board,” Baltimore Sun (April 14, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648312/.
  40. Fred Barbash, “The Scene Is Garrett County; The Time Seems to Be 1930,” Baltimore Sun (September 27, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/72991318/the-garrett-county-strike-would-make-for/.
  41. Shindel, “Garrett County (Md.) Road Workers Strike of 1970.”
  42. Thomas Edsall B, “Garrett County Insulated To Change From Outsiders,” Baltimore Sun (September 9, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648779/.
  43. “Garrett Roads Deteriorate In Strike,” Evening Sun (May 28, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88648863/.
  44. “Suspect Quizzed In Fence Blast,” Baltimore Sun (June 18, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88649257/.
  45. “Non-Union Men Held Off Jobs After Facing Road Workers,” Baltimore Sun (August 4, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88649397/.
  46. “Two Incumbents Lose In Garrett,” Baltimore Sun (September 16, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88607204/.
  47. David Ettlin, “Election Viewed As Marking End Of Garrett Strike,” Baltimore Sun (November 4, 1970), baltimoresun.newspapers.com/clip/88607342/.
  48. Brandt Maxwell, “A Few Lists of 2008 Election Results (Part II),” Geography Lists, 2008, www.geographylists.com/list21j.html.
  49. Officers And Members of Garrett County Road Workers Union, Local 1834, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, “Open Letter to Ex-State Senator Clifford Friend,” Garrett Road Strike (The Citizen, September 3, 1970), garrettroadstrike.com/contrasting-views-afscme/.
  50. Brenda Ruggiero, “Marker Commemorates Garrett Road Workers Strike of 1970,” Garrett County Republican (Garrett Road Strike, June 17, 2021), garrettroadstrike.com/garrett-county-republican-coverage/.