13 Million Dollars heading to workers at Maryland state prisons for stolen wages

MARYLAND – 13 million dollars is heading to prison workers in the AFSCME Council 3 Union as part of a partial settlement with the Federal Department of Labor Wage and Hour division.

The settlement is based on evidence, interviews, and complaints from AFSCME members over the last two years that found the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services violated the Federal Fair Labors Standards Act, stealing wages from our membership.

This is the second-largest wage theft settlement for correctional officers in DOL history.

“I also want to apologize on behalf of the state that this happened and let our workers know how unacceptable this practice was. It was a blatant violation of the long-established, fair labor standards Act, and trained professionals should have and did know better,” said Maryland State Comptroller Brooke Lierman during a DPW meeting Wednesday.

Speaking at the meeting Governor Moore called the settlement a way of making workers whole and righting the wrongs of the previous administration.

“We not only owe them this long overdue back pay, frankly, we owe them an apology, an apology for having for having either inadequate timekeeping systems and or inappropriate places and policies in place and an apology for the years that have gone,” he said.

AFSCME President Patrick Moran said he was encouraged by the hearing and the settlement, calling the move a stark reversal of the previous administration’s position.

“I have to commend them for that because, under the previous administration, their efforts and their actions were deny, deny, deny, deny, which it turns out was a lie after lie after lie,” he said adding that the Hogan Administration told his union’s lawyers that the wage theft was unfounded, before calling them the result of a systems glitch.

“This was not a glitch this was someone trying to run things on the cheap, and stealing the wages that people earned,” Moran said.

He tells us he hopes to see future settlements for all workers in the state impacted and accountability for those who he says were responsible for the wage theft moving forward.

He tells us settlements will be varied from worker to worker, but would stand to impact between 3,000 to 4,000 workers employed at ECI.