The strike is over.
After eight days and four hours, the strike by the city’s largest blue-collar workers union ended after overnight negotiations between the city and union leaders led to a tentative agreement that was announced around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, July 9.
This means that the 9,000 front-line workers represented by the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 33 — sanitation workers, water department employees, school crossing guards, 911 dispatchers, medical examiners office staff, library maintenance and others — will return to work immediately.
“The work stoppage involving District Council 33 and the City of Philadelphia is OVER,” Mayor Cherelle Parker announced on social media early Wednesday morning.
Importantly, trash collection doesn’t start until Monday.
Despite agreeing to the deal — which still needs to be voted on by the membership — union leaders say they aren’t happy about it.
“The strike is over, and nobody’s happy,” said Greg Boulware, president of DC 33, told the Philadelphia Inquirer as he exited negotiations. “We felt our clock was running out.”
Boulware said leadership did the best it could with its members’ best interests in mind.
What’s in the deal?
The DC33 members had been on strike since 12:01 a.m. on July 1.
The initial offer from the city called for raises of 2.75%, 3% and 3% over three years.
The final deal provides 3% wage increases each year over three years, for a total of 9% by 2028, plus a one-time $1,500 bonus.
Union leaders originally wanted a 8% annual wage increase over three years, then lowered their demand to 5% per year.
Members of DC 33 earn an average annual salary of $46,000 — a pay rate that the Inquirer notes is more than $2,000 below Philadelphia’s “living wage.”
The contract also includes the creation of a fifth step in the union pay scale, which could boost wages by about 2% for longtime DC 33 members.
The deal applies retroactively to July 1 and will cost the city a little more than $115 million over the three years.
Union members stood to miss their first check in the work stoppage later this week.
When do services resume?
Curbside trash pickup is set to resume on Monday, July 14. Over the next few days, sanitation workers will clean up all the temporary dumpsites where residents dropped off their trash during the strike. Carlton Williams, director of the city’s Clean and Green initiative, added people should stop dumping their bags at the more than 60 locations.
City pools’ maintenance staff are back at work already, but adding the water is not due to be complete and ready to be reopened until July 14.
The Free Library of Philadelphia have reopened several locations, including the main Parkway Central branch, with others slated to resume hours in the coming days.
The first days
Within the first 24 hours of the strike, the impact was felt immediately across the city and halls of power, with libraries and many cooling centers closing, trash piles growing in every neighborhood — soon dubbed “Parker piles” — and city officials quickly taking to the courts to chip away at the strike’s strength.
On Tuesday, July 1, the first day of the strike, a judge sided with the city in ordering more than 200 911 dispatchers to return to work in order to avoid delays in emergency response times and public health.
That same court order also applied to some essential Philadelphia Water Department workers. Another preliminary injunction filed by the city also prohibited DC33 picketers from blocking or obstructing access to municipal buildings.
Striking medical examiner’s office employees were also ordered by a Philadelphia judge to report for duty with the 3 p.m. shift on Thursday — the strike’s third day — after the city sought the order over delays in picking up the bodies of residents who had died.
A 6ABC report noted a sobering example of the problem — a 19-year-old man died after being shot in Germantown at 5:47 a.m. but, many hours later, his body was still lying in the street.
Another court order obtained by the city prevented striking sanitation workers from “gathering in groups of more than eight, or standing within 10 feet of city property (which includes sanitation centers), or engaging in behavior deemed as intimidating or harassing.”
This created tensions at one city sanitation center last Wednesday, where dozens of sanitation workers had a standoff with authorities.
DC33 president Greg Boulware characterized the city’s use of the courts to break the strike as bad-faith moves by the city. “Clearly the city doesn’t want to negotiate in good faith with us by doing tactics like this to make sure that they diminish any opportunity for us to have an effective strike on the side of this city,” he said.
The smell of solidarity
With sanitation workers on strike, there was no curbside trash or recycling collections. The city’s list of temporary waste dropoff sites for people to bring their trash in the meantime sparked further confusion and clashes. Some dropoff locations were in unclear locations, and there was tension between law enforcement and union workers at various sites. Residents also wondered whether using the dropoff sites was tantamount to crossing the picket line.
Residents described the growing piles of trash and debris, which quickly smelled under the beating sun of a weekslong heat wave, as “embarrassing” and “shocking.”
Despite the issues, the union position received broad support — including from some high-profile celebrities.
Rapper and Grammy-winning icon LL Cool J bowed out of the Wawa Welcome America concert when the strike remained unresolved heading into his July 4 show.
“I’m not gonna cross a picket line,” he said on Instagram.
Philly singer-songwriter Jazmine Sullivan later followed suit.
Asked what they think about the final tentative wage agreement, Philadelphians said they empathized with the DC 33 members.
Sanitation workers are providing “public infrastructure necessities” and should get more than the “bare minimum,” South Philly resident Ronald Jones said.
“If sanitation fails today or tomorrow, if it just completely flat out fails – 20-30 years off my life expectancy, off of your life expectancy and rodents, disease, infestation,” he said.
He explained that he thought city workers deserved “more liveable salaries.”
South Philly nanny Bobbi Harwell felt similarly. She explained she “wasn’t frustrated” by the strike, as she understood what the union was fighting for.
“I know what it is to work and then your money can’t [be sufficient for] you to live,” she said. “So if they have to do what they have to do, then they have to do what they have to do. Like they have to come up with a solution. The city has the money, give them the money.”
She noted that Mayor Cherelle Parker’s actions didn’t feel fair.
“I think she focuses on stuff that matters the least to the lower- and middle-class citizens, but if she focused on more of the stuff that really affects us, then that would have been a better decision,” she said.
South Philly resident Johnny Disciascio was among those who said it was up to the negotiating parties to decide what is fair.
“It’s not really up to me if it’s fair, it’s really up to the workers and what they decide to accept at the end of the day,” he said. “Obviously I would like them to get more. Negotiations are not as flattering for both sides as people would like it to be.”
Disciascio explained he is sympathetic to the union, but also said Parker is in a tough position.
“I think there’s some blame to give her, but I also have to acknowledge the fact that she’s stuck in the boys club as a Black woman,” he said. “So there’s probably a lot that she’s getting bullied around with.”
He said he was disappointed with the situation.
“I mean it stinks. Like, literally,” said Disciascio. “It’s frustrating that an American city that you pay taxes to lets this happen, but that’s every American city, unfortunately.”
South Philly resident Martha Tovar said she felt like her neighborhood did a good job managing trash during the strike, but that not all communities have the financial resources or time to do so.
Tovar explained she thought the final deal was “fair.” She said Mayor Parker “did the best she could in the situation” and “I’m very appreciative of our trash men. I give them bonuses during the holidays … they’re doing the best that they can.”
Business and community responses
While many private businesses rely on their own trash haulers for routine pickups, the impact of the DC 33 strike left its mark on entire neighborhoods.
Marc Collazzo, executive director of the Fishtown Kensington Area Business Improvement District, called the end of the strike a relief for the community.
“While we are fortunate that in a commercial quarter, a lot of the properties have private trash removal, you’re still dealing with apartments, apartment dwellers who had nowhere to put things, and oftentimes they’re still putting it outside or letting things pile up just because they have nowhere to take them,” Collazzo said.
In order to try and keep Fishtown and Kensington walkable and the streets clean, the local business improvement district brought in additional resources and personnel.
According to Collazzo, the BID relied on the Fishtown Community Corps for help, and they brought in additional services with the nonprofit Ready, Willing & Able Philadelphia.
“While we don’t remove actual trash bags, we do sweep, clean up debris, and it certainly really maxed out our capabilities,” he said.
Some neighborhoods also relied on privatized trash services for businesses, West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative President Jabari Jones said. He explained this was necessary, especially for food-centered businesses in the community.
“There were a lot of people that, of course, wanted to show solidarity to the workers of DC 33, but they also know that the health and safety of their customers is going to be their responsibility,” he said. “And a number of people, especially my food-based businesses and businesses that have food waste, were really concerned about potential pests and insects and all that other stuff.”
Jones said high demand also led to “skyrocketing” costs for private pickups.
“There were some people that started with doing [private trash pickup] for $30 for a couple of bags,” he said. “But somebody told me that when they got towards the end of the strike, someone’s paying $450 for somebody to come pick up some kind of trash from their business.”
Collazzo said, overall, he was proud of how his community rallied together.
“Certainly in times of stress and crisis, it’s really incumbent on neighborhoods to kind of come together to help each other,” Collazzo said. “I can only speak for ours that everybody, for the most part, really did and tried to comply and tried to bring their trash where they needed it to be.”
Other neighborhood leaders had a different experience.
“It was truly horrible,” said Claudia Smith Sherrod, consultant and former president of the Point Breeze Community Network Plus.
Sherrod saw untied trash bags left out on the street and was concerned about the health and sanitation of Point Breeze.
“We’ve got to do better if we don’t want animals going into our homes, like the mice and roaches,” she said.
Ultimately, she wished that sanitation workers had chosen a different approach to negotiations that did not have such a negative impact on her neighborhood.
“I think people do what they have to do, but the bottom line is they need to think about the very people who pay their paychecks,” she said. “In this city of big brotherly love, our health was really impacted by negligence to take the trash away.”
As for the end of the strike, Sherrod is thankful and says she supported Mayor Parker.
“I think she did the best she possibly could under the situation she was presented with,” she said.
Collazzo said she thought the strike was a learning lesson for the community and appreciated the tough position all parties found themselves in.
“It’s not an easy job for the mayor,” he said. “I know she was doing the best that she can, but I don’t know that anybody wins in this.”
Library impacts
The DC33 strike didn’t just include sanitation workers – the union also represents employees who work for libraries, pools and recreation centers.
Some of the biggest impacts in neighborhoods were disruptions in services beyond trash pickup, said Eugene Desyatnik, the president of the Bella Vista Neighbors Association .
“We have a lot of families in Bella Vista. And for the pools – already a short window to begin with – like, they only open, they don’t open the whole summer, it’s only for 6 weeks, and now you’re cutting into those 6 weeks. And that was a big loss.”
Desyatnik added that while the neighborhood’s library was already having HVAC issues that made it an unreliable location for relief from the heat, the strike made things worse.
“Our library is a very important asset to the neighborhood,” he said. “It’s in the heart of Bella Vista and a lot of people use it for a meeting space or job searches. And of course we have a lot of families.”
Another concern was recreation center hour adjustments, he said, as the neighborhood association uses the recreation center to address zoning cases.
“We had to cancel two zoning cases,” he said. “The only thing we’re required to do by the city is hear zoning cases and we couldn’t do that. We have two cases we had to cancel, and now the applicant is gonna have to spend extra money mailing new invitations out.”
He explained the association doesn’t have the money for another space to hold these things, and it relies heavily on these community spaces.
Still, Desyatnik said, Bella Vista neighbors have been working on beautification and were good at holding their trash and adhering to rules, and that neighborhood sentiment was generally very supportive of all DC 33 workers.
“The workers of DC 33 are not just limited to sanitation, right?” he said. “It’s our librarians and our rec center workers, so everybody that is represented by that union, because they’re really important to the work we do and they’re partners with us in all of this.”
This is a developing story and will be updated regularly.
