Something Is Still Rotten in the City of Philadelphia

It has now been a week since Philadelphia’s striking municipal workers went back on the job. During their historic eight-day work stoppage, normal city operations ground to a very obvious halt.

When contract negotiations broke down at the end of June between Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration and AFSCME District Council 33—which represents 9,000 of the city’s blue-collar employees—the union had a choice. It could accept a contract extension (as it had already done in 2024) or consent to stay at the bargaining table and work without a contract. Instead, the union chose the more difficult path. For the first time since 1986, DC33 walked out.

The major issue was money. DC33 is the lowest-paid of the city’s four municipal unions; it is also the only one with a majority-Black membership. In 2024, the union was able to negotiate a 5 percent raise alongside the contract extension that Mayor Parker had requested, but even with that small bump, the members struggled.

The median salary for a DC33 member is $46,000, startlingly low compared to those of their counterparts in places like Chicago and New York City; for sanitation workers, with a salary range of $39–42,000, that comes out to about $18–20 per hour to deal with the 610,000 tons of trash the city generates annually, and falls several thousand dollars short of a living wage. One of the primary purposes of a strike is to apply pressure, and few of us enjoy quite so much leverage as a sanitation worker in a major city during the midst of a summer heat wave.

When DC33’s representatives, including outspoken union president Greg Boulware, sat down with the city to hammer out a new contract for its members, they aimed to make significant improvements to that embarrassing status quo. It shouldn’t have been that big of a lift. The city currently has a budget surplus of $882 million that is under the mayor’s direct control. Parker budgeted $550 million to cover new contracts for the four municipal unions (DC33, its sister union DC47, the firefighters, and the police, whose recruits start at a comparatively princely $64,000).

Given that the mayor’s latest city budget proposal includes $872 million for the police department, out of a total $6.7 billion, one might have assumed that Parker could easily find a few extra pennies for the city’s blue-collar workers. In addition, Mayor Parker proudly styles herself and her administration as pro-worker and pro-union. Her own personal story of growing up in poverty in North Philadelphia burnishes her working-class bona fides, and as the first Black woman to hold Philadelphia’s top job, she shares common ground with many of the women who make up DC33. Parker, a moderate Democrat who ran on “tough on crime” policies, is especially friendly with the building trades, whose support helped her get elected in 2023. Conversely, DC33 declined to endorse her that year, and her evolving relationship with the union and its leadership has remained less than cozy.

Despite this, reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer implied that the union still hadn’t expected to be met with so much resistance, and was taken aback by the Parker administration’s combative, sometimes outright hostile posture during the strike. After a few days on the picket lines, in an effort to play ball, DC33 even bumped their original ask of an 8 percent raise for each year of a four-year contract down to 5 percent, but Parker refused to budge, citing a need to keep the city “on solid fiscal ground.”

The term “blue-collar city worker” covers a lot of bases, and it’s a high-wire act to keep a city of 1.5 million people running at all, let alone efficiently, without the people whose job titles fall under that vague definition. This became very clear, very quickly, when the strike began at 12:01 am on July 1. But instead of returning to the bargaining table with a better offer, the Parker administration ran to the courts. A flood of litigation began the moment DC33 walked out. A judge quickly granted the city three injunctions: one that forced striking 911 dispatchers back to work, another that did the same to a “skeleton crew” of water department employees, and one that slapped restrictions on workers and their allies’ ability to picket outside municipal buildings.

Philadelphia’s labor community was taken aback. “Aggressive injunctions meant to break a strike and attacking union leaders to divide them from membership is straight from the anti-union playbook,” City Council member Kendra Brooks said in a statement following the end of the strike. “That’s divisive in a pro-union town.”

By July 3, another injunction sent strikers from the medical examiners’ office back to work. A “backlog” meant that the morgue was “over capacity,” as news coverage delicately phrased it, and bodies were being stored two to a bed. The lack of staff had also left the office struggling to pick up and transport bodies to refrigerated storage areas, as exemplified by the horrifying story of a 19-year-old man who had been shot in the face early that morning and left for dead. His body lay in the street for hours, half a block from his home. As the mayor continued to insist that the city’s offer was worth taking, corpses were piling up and bodies were being left outside in 90-degree weather because the workers who usually handled them were out sweating on the picket lines.

The living were suffering, too. Late in the evening on July 3—perhaps the strike’s most unfortunately eventful day—36-year-old sanitation worker Tyree Ford and his pregnant fiancée, fellow DC33 member Aaliyah Norris, were doing picket duty on Delaware Avenue when a drunk driver swerved onto the sidewalk they were sitting on. In the split second before it hit them, Ford leapt to push Norris out of the way, saving her life as well as that of their unborn son. That left only his body to absorb the impact from the black SUV.

According to his sister, Crystal Purnell-Bolden, Ford suffered a litany of severe injuries, including multiple skull fractures, a broken femur, a broken collarbone, a broken pelvis, and injuries to his eyes, face, and lungs. The father of six has a long road ahead of him, and his sister has set up a GoFundMe to help with his medical expenses. “Those men and women are out there just to do their part and to have something tragically happen like that senselessly, it’s terrible,” DC33 president Greg Boulware said when he heard the news. “God willing he’s able to recover. He may never get the opportunity to work again because of the severity of his injuries.”