Salisbury City Council considering collective bargaining for city employees

July 18, 2022

Han Cechini,

SALISBURY, Md. – Salisbury city employees may be able to look forward to partaking in collective bargaining. Monday, Salisbury City Council met to add the provision into the city’s charter.

“Ultimately, we want a competitive workforce. We want people to be in their positions. We want our services that are funded to be provided,” said Mayor Jake Day. “It puts us at a disadvantage when we’re competing with less busy jurisdictions, whether that’s the rural areas of Wicomico County, or beyond.”

The collective bargaining would be open to all city employees not in a management position. This comes after Salisbury Career Firefighters Local 4246 (SCFL) brought the issue to Council a number of years ago.

“It was our goal to set forth a mission to see that through. There has been an enormous amount of meetings and negotiations back and forth with the city,” said SCFL President Ryan Jones. “We are getting to a point where the recognition from this, and the recognition from the contract, will finally put the men and women in this department in a place where they can be a little more confident in the direction of the department, their pay wages, their benefits, and working conditions.”

Jones says as the department is trying to attract and retain new recruits, it’s also looking to guarantee better care for its existing personnel.

“Taking into account that we work 24 hour shifts, sometimes 36 hour shifts, in a very high paced, demanding department in the city, we’re finally getting ourselves to a point where we’re going to be able to not have any discrepancies in the future when it comes to being competitive,” said Jones. “Having collective bargaining, having a contract, which is bound by law is going to be a massive turn on for people when they’re looking at coming to the Salisbury Fire Department.”

Mayor Day says the next steps in the process will be to adjust the city’s labor code to allow for collective bargaining. Next, would come negotiating contracts with recognized unions. While Mayor Day says some may hold trepidation around implementing the practice, due to potential higher costs to the City, he’s not worried about it.

“I think in general, when you run into this topic, some of the push back you hear is ‘What is this going to cost us?’ To the credit of those at the table so far, what we’re hearing is that they want the things they’ve been provided with for years to be guaranteed,” said Mayor Day.