Mayor Cherelle Parker reached a one-year deal with the city’s biggest union, averting a strike

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker on Friday night announced that the city and its largest municipal union had reached agreement on her proposed one-year contract extension, ending a monthslong standoff and averting a strike that could have halted trash collection and other city services.

The 8,400 workers of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees District Council 33 have been working without a contract since their last deal, negotiated under former Mayor Jim Kenney, expired on July 1.

The new, retroactive tentative agreement, which includes 5% raises and $1,400 one-time bonuses, will expire on June 30, 2025. The deal will cost the city $80.2 million over five years and largely continues the terms of the Kenney-era contract for issues other than wages, such as retirement and health-care benefits.

“I am absolutely positively clear that [the administration’s] vision cannot be a reality if we don’t have the men and women who are part of the city of Philadelphia’s municipal workforce … have the respect and dignity that they deserve,” Parker said at a City Hall news conference Friday night.

DC33 and SEPTA union leaders had been coordinating strategy amid separate contract negotiations earlier in the week, which could have included a united-front strike. But SEPTA and its unions reached tentative agreements for their workers on Wednesday.

The dispute between Parker and DC33 was an unusual one because it was primarily about the length of the union’s contract, rather than pay or benefits.

Mayors traditionally sign four-year contracts that begin in the summer of their first year. Parker, who took office in January, instead asked all four major municipal unions to sign one-year deals to allow her administration time to get on its feet. The unions for police officers, firefighters, and white-collar workers like supervisors all previously agreed to the short-term extensions.

But DC33 held out, insisting on a multiyear deal that could give union members greater stability in the event that an economic downturn drags down the city budget. Union president Greg Boulware, who was elected in June after campaigning in part on securing a multiyear contract, recently asked his members to authorize union leadership to call a strike if talks stalled.

On Nov. 14, when the strike authorization vote was tallied, 87% of the roughly 3,400 members who participated voted to give him that power.

» READ MORE: Greg Boulware has been elected the new leader of AFSCME DC 33, Philly’s largest union for city workers

“It wasn’t going to be a nice Thanksgiving, but we’ve averted that to be able to keep moving forward,” Boulware said at Friday night’s news conference.

With an average annual pay of between $40,000 and $45,000, DC33 members are the city’s lowest-paid union employees. A decade ago, in 2014, members made on average $35,000 which would be around $47,000 in today’s dollars.

While Boulware did not achieve his goal of reaching a longer contract, the 5% across-the-board raise is DC33’s largest one-year increase in more than 30 years, Parker said, and it’s also bigger than the 4.4% pay bumps other union workers received this year.

The last contract, reached in 2021, included 9% raises over three years, additional increases for sanitation workers, and four weeks of paid parental leave.

After the union’s contract expired in 2009, it took five years for DC33 to reach a tentative deal with Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration, as the 2008 recession had left the city cash-strapped. By the time a deal was reached in 2014, workers hadn’t seen raises in seven years.

In an October interview, Boulware described the union’s members as “the working poor.” Historically, that has been the case, says Francis Ryan, a labor history professor at Rutgers University.

The city took over trash collection from independent contractors in 1922, Ryan said, and these municipal sanitation jobs were seen as “low-paying,” but steady, “yearlong employment,” Ryan said.

Over the years the size of the union has shrunk; it had 13,000 members in 1986.

Ryan said that DC33 lost a third of its membership after 1992 because members felt the nonunion health-care plan options were better than what the union offered. Some former union jobs were also contracted out, and some were left open for budgetary reasons after workers retired.

The city has been making progress toward filling vacant municipal jobs this year. One in five of those positions was vacant in July, The Inquirer reported. Still, 18% of full-time positions with the city remained unfilled as of Sept. 30, the most recent date for which figures were available.

“Every single department across the city has been deficient,” Boulware said earlier this month. “How do you attract people without increasing the wages that are coming in and making some of the benefits more attractive?”

Parker, whose negotiating team was led by Chief Deputy Mayor Sinceré Harris, has committed to negotiating multiyear contracts with all four unions that would take effect next summer.

“It’s just a stepping-stone into the direction that we would like to see our membership be in,” Boulware said. “We pledged that we want to fight for our members to change the quality of life for them.”

The deal announced Friday also includes the creation of a new job title — sanitation worker — and automatically promotes all laborers within the Department of Sanitation into that role, bumping them up into a higher pay range. A similar arrangement was created for asphalt-breakers in the Streets Department.

Parker has been an ally to organized labor throughout her career, and it would have been shocking if she had allowed the DC33 dispute to reach the point of a strike. But Friday night’s announcement also marked the second time in Parker’s first year as mayor that she had stared down a municipal union and largely got what she wanted.

Earlier this year, AFSCME’s District Council 47, which represents professionals and midlevel managers and has more office workers than DC33, sued Parker over her strict return-to-work policy, which requires all city employees to work in person five days a week after many had been working two or three days in the office since the coronavirus pandemic. Rather than compromise, Parker fought it out in court, and a Common Pleas Court judge ruled in favor of the administration in July.

Boulware has been seeking significant pay bumps, more generous pension plans, and the relaxation of a rule that requires all city employees except veteran police officers to live in Philadelphia.

He’s likely to face fierce resistance from Parker on the residency issue. As a City Council member, Parker supported measures to ensure the city’s jobs are preserved as economic opportunities for Philadelphia residents.

DC33 has not gone on strike since 1986, when a 20-day work stoppage halted city services.

That strike interrupted trash pickup, and by the end, some emergency disposal dump sites had filled with “stinking, maggot-laced garbage,” the Daily News reported. The work stoppage was the longest municipal worker strike in the city’s history, the Daily News reported at the time.