Today, RBTs at Verbal Beginnings went on strike. After voting 33-1 to join Teamsters Local 639, these workers waited 437 long, frustrating days for management to take a wage proposal seriously. Throughout the campaign, Verbal Beginnings Management said their door was always open. Rockville's techs took them up on it.
🚨 You can help by calling Verbal Beginnings at 855-782-4417 and demanding they sign a fair contract, now.
👉 Follow @vb_union639 on Instagram for updates, solidarity, and opportunities to support
FAIR PAY IN ABA
The techs are carrying signs that everyone in ABA needs to hear: FAIR PAY IN ABA. Across the country, ABA clinics are cropping up left and right, expanding at a rapid pace, leaving already established centers resource-depleted, understaffed, and underpaid. RBTs often work multiple jobs, and promises from management don't pay your rent, they won't fill your fridge, they won't put gas in your tank.
RBTs provide important, difficult, technical, emotional, physical services to kids and families that depend on them - and the industry treats them as disposable. CentralReach's 2025 Market Report and the BACB's December 2025 Newsletter highlighted the turnstile nature of the field: RBT turnover has become a crisis, and pay is the problem. Meanwhile, agencies are receiving multi-million dollar investment from private equity companies that reduce clients to line items and workers into disposable cogs to feed the machine. As the Gen Z workforce becomes increasingly economically starved, companies continue to exploit this young, caring workforce - taking advantage of their age to cut corners on benefits and health insurance, and relying on their desperation to ensure they'll have a fresh wave of recruits as staff tap out.
The nature of our work is based on relationships - if your tech can only afford to work the month for a few months, your model is broken. If you have the money to expand, you have the money to grow what you already have.
Verbal Beginnings, invest in your employees.
After 33 workers made their voice loud and clear on May 1st, 2025, those technicians are now walking the picket line demanding fair pay, better facilities standards, safer staffing ratios, dignity for their clients, and respect for the work that they do.
Shamefully, management is shuffling clients to other locations, putting parents and children in precarious positions rather than owning the mess that they've made and coming to the table with reasonable offers. Continuity of care requires continuity of caregivers. These workers are standing up to make the care they provide sustainable. They're fighting to stay in their clients' lives. They're fighting for jobs they can afford to keep.
Rockville is sending a message across ABA: our working conditions are our clients’ learning conditions. When ABA workers stand together, the industry has no choice but to listen.
Solidarity with the Verbal Beginnings workers fighting for a fair first contract.