Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley toured a training center for construction workers Wednesday, but the only unionized workers in sight were trainers.
Most of the hundreds of laborers trained there were out broiling in the heat hauling brick, pouring concrete and doing the other work on building sites, but at least they were making more than minimum wage ? $10.50 an hour for apprentices, $14.33 for regular union members, according to union officials.
O?Malley?s visit was to support an increase in the minimum wage and the requirement to pay prevailing union wages for state construction work.
“No issue better illustrates [the governing philosophy of Gov. Ehrlich] than his opposition to hiking the minimum wage, and efforts to curtail the use of union wage scales on some state projects,” O?Malley said. “We should not have to override our own governor.”
Asked for a reaction, Ehrlich spokesman Henry Fawell called the O?Malley visit “the routine daily publicity stunt” from the mayor, just as was his letter to Ehrlich on Monday, asking the governor to co-sign a letter to President Bush asking him to push for “an up or down vote” on increasing the federal minimum wage.
Erhlich?s veto of a hike in the state minimum wage to $6.15 was overturned by the legislature.
“It is his belief that all states should do this uniformly on the national level,” Fawell said.
But Ehrlich as a congressman had opposed such a federal increase because it would cost jobs for some of the lowest-paid workers.
Many of the trainees that come to Laborers Union center are unemployed or making minimum wage, and 95 percent are from the city, director Lou DeGraff said.
“We receive 100 calls a week,” said the union?s Lionel Smith. “We have no trouble placing them.”
The center is funded by the union, which has three area local affiliates and 80 to 120 union building contractors in the Baltimore area. The trainees receive three weeks of basic training before they are sent out on jobs.
