“The Group is a ‘Fraternal Order’ and Not a Labor Union”: The 1974 Baltimore Police Strike and the Conservative Turn in Police Labor Union Organizing

Abstract

This study is a top-down narrative of the 1974 Baltimore Police Strike. It focuses on how and why Baltimore police failed to join the progressive wave of public employee organizing facilitated by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Baltimore City from the 1960s to the late-1980s. This thesis asked exactly why Baltimore Police saw fit to align themselves with the city’s other municipal employees, joining a blue-collar, public sector union like AFSCME instead of more traditional police benevolent associations like the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)? It also asks how and why AFSCME leaders failed to secure better wages for their police members while also leaving them vulnerable to harsh reprisals from city administration, allowing for the rise of the FOP in AFSCME’s place? This study found that the 1974 strike was the result of decades worth of mismanagement which pushed officers into AFSCME. That relationship led to the police’s involvement in the 1974 Baltimore City Municipal Strike and directly challenged the Baltimore City Police Commissioner Donald Pomerleau’s authoritarianism, resulting in the subversion of AFSCME by city administration who preferred the Fraternal Order of Police over AFSCME—facilitating the Fraternal Order’s rise in Baltimore City and Maryland into the 1980s.