Philadelphia

As the historic strike by 9,000 members of Philadelphia’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33 continues, workers’ militancy is escalating, and support for them is growing. Mountains of uncollected garbage are growing at official city collection sites in neighborhoods around the city. Some have been dubbed “the Parker Piles” after Mayor Cherelle Parker.

Actions in support of the striking workers are being held all over the city, from protests outside municipal buildings to shutdowns of scab trash collection sites to librarians’ refusals to cross the picket lines of their library staff maintenance coworkers.

At Eakins Oval — on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway where the city’s official “Wawa Welcome America” concerts and other July 4th celebrations will be held — over 150 DC 33 workers and supporters staged an action on July 3 to prohibit nonunion contractors from setting up the staging area.

With chants of “Mayor Parker, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side,” and “On strike, shut it down, Philly is a union town,” DC 33 members, librarians, teachers, unionized staff from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, United Auto Workers members and others shut down traffic for hours.

Many members of other unions, community groups and people on the left in this city have joined the picket lines and provided food, water, sunscreen and other necessities.

DC 33 represents workers from 15 separate union locals in multiple city divisions, including streets and sanitation, recreation, water, finance, health, parking, 911 call centers, school crossing guards, library maintenance, the Philadelphia Housing Authority and the Philadelphia International Airport.

Since the strike began, the Parker administration has used the courts to issue injunctions forcing workers in health centers, 911 call centers and the water department to return to work.

In the first year of her four-year term in November 2024, after DC 33 authorized a strike, Mayor Parker agreed to a one-year contract which included a 5% raise, a $1,400 bonus and other benefits. That contract expired on June 30. In the current contract negotiations, the city is only offering raises totaling 7% over three years, which are being advertised as 12% with the inclusion of the 2024 agreement.

The union’s contract demand is for 5% per year over four years.  DC 33 is also asking for the city to eliminate its existing two-tier pension and health-care benefit programs and for a provision that would allow union members to live outside the city where average rents are much lower than in Philadelphia. Police and firefighters in Philadelphia have this provision.

Wages lower than average in U.S. cities

According to NBC Channel 10 news on July 2, sanitation workers in Philadelphia make $39,000 to $42,000 a year, “the lowest of any major cities” the station’s researchers looked at, including Chicago and Dallas. This pay rate averages from $18 to $20 an hour. But even in Chicago where sanitation workers earn from $25 to $30 an hour, it’s still below that city’s living wage.

Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator found that the living wage for a Philadelphia family with one child would need to be double this amount — nearly $39 an hour to provide a normal standard of living. In reality, as union leaders have said at public rallies, these Philadelphia workers are the working poor. Parker’s 2% annual wage increase won’t cover these essential workers’ rents!

The MIT study estimates the cost of living based on typical expenses including housing, transportation, food and childcare.  The average DC 33 worker’s salary doesn’t even cover these costs for a single individual! For a family of four, the combined costs for food and childcare exceed the average DC 33 worker’s income.

While Parker claimed at a news conference on July 3 that this is the “best offer any administration has given to these workers in 40 years,” she neglected to say that DC 33 won wage increases in 1986 through a 20-day strike. Claiming this was the “best offer” she has given to anyone in the city, Parker neglected to mention her proposed gift of a $60 million Community Benefits Agreement to the multibillionaire owners of the 76ers basketball team to build an arena in the Chinatown area of the city! (workers.org/2025/01/83154/)

Huge salary increases for Parker’s expanding staff

At a rally on June 30, DC 33 distributed information that Parker had given herself a 9% raise — which she quickly disputed. However, Parker did benefit from a 9% pay increase stemming from one given to her predecessor, Mayor Jim Kenney, in 2024, which raised his salary to $261,497 in the months before he left office. Parker now makes $269,708 — a 3.1% increase over 2024 — also a higher annual percentage increase than she is willing to offer to DC 33 members.

But while Parker didn’t give herself a 9% raise, in 2024 she doled out substantial increases to her staff which grew from 39 positions to 113, with a 151% spending increase for personnel costs, with her average staffer getting a 16% pay increase over the previous year — and in some cases as much as 32%.

These increases benefitted the new Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, who earns $340,000 a year; Atif Saeed, CEO of the Philadelphia International Airport, who makes $335,000 per year (a 3% increase over last year); and Adam Geer, Chief Public Safety Director, who coordinates the city’s “anti-crime efforts” outside of the police department, who earns $265,000 in a salary mandated position created under legislation last year. (Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 2024)

What to expect next

Negotiations between the union and the Parker administration stopped on July 3. During the multiple days of July 4th celebrations, when hundreds of thousands of people are expected to gather on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway each day, there will be no collections of trash or recyclables, no experienced 911 emergency dispatchers and no maintenance of public bathrooms, runways or airfields at the airport.

Philly is indeed a union town, and support for the DC 33 workers is clearly growing. The union plans to leaflet participants in the official city events to help win their support.  The union got a major boost when rapper LL Cool J and singer-songwriter Jazmine Sullivan, scheduled to perform at the Wawa Welcome America concert on July 4, pulled out in solidarity with the striking workers.

This strike is helping to set an example of what workers, united, need to do in the growing fight against the bosses as exemplified by the anti-worker and anti-immigrant measures of the Trump administration.

“When we fight, we win!”  DC 33 says, “Shut it down!