PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Striking city workers waved signs at traffic near Philadelphia City Hall and formed picket lines outside libraries, city offices and other workplaces as nearly 10,000 blue-collar workers walked off the job Tuesday
Seeking better pay and benefits, District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees announced the strike on its Facebook page early Tuesday.
Mayor Cherelle Parker said the city would suspend residential trash collection, close some city pools and shorten recreation center hours, but vowed to keep the city running. Police and firefighters are not on strike, but the DC33 membership includes 911 dispatchers, trash collectors, water department workers and many others.
By midday Tuesday, three librarians in town from Knoxville, Tennessee, for a convention arrived to tour the Free Library of Philadelphia on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, only to find the wrought iron gates closed as workers cheerfully protested outside. They stopped to chat with them and offer their support.
“We’re just out here trying to get fair wages, to try to get a better cost of living, because, as you know, everything in the world right now is going up,” said Dhafir Gerald, 48, a library security guard who said he loves the city because it gave him a second chance after a long-ago incarceration.
“The city has the money to pay us,” said Gerald, who makes about $46,000 a year after six years of service, the first few with the sanitation department. “We are the backbone of the city.”
Parker, a pro-labor Democrat, promised that Fourth of July celebrations in the nation’s birthplace would go on as usual.
“Keep your holiday plans. Don’t leave the city,” she said at a Monday afternoon news conference that followed hours of last-minute negotiations.
In a statement Tuesday, the mayor said the city had “put its best offer on the table.” The city offered raises that amount to 13% over her four-year term, including last year’s 5% bump, and added a fifth step to the pay scale to align with other city unions, she said.
“The City of Philadelphia remains committed to reaching a fair and fiscally responsible contract with our municipal workers who are a part of DC 33,” Parker said. “We are ready, willing and able to resume negotiations with the union at their convenience.”
City officials urged residents to be patient and not hang up should they need to call either 911 or the city’s nonemergency helpline. They said they would open drop-off sites for residential trash.
District Council 33 is the largest of four major unions representing city workers. Union president Greg Boulware did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Union leaders, in their initial contract proposal, asked for 8% annual raises each year of the three-year contract, along with cost-of-living hikes and bonuses of up to $5,000 for those who worked through the pandemic. The union also asked the city to pay the full cost of employee health care, or $1,700 per person per month.
In November, the city transit system averted a strike when the parties agreed to a one-year contract with 5% raises.
A DC33 trash strike in the summer of 1986 left the city without trash pickup for three weeks, leading trash to pile up on streets, alleyways and drop-off sites.
“Like any workers in this country, I think that they have a right to expect a livable wage, and it’s really nice to see our country’s ability to still have strikes and still have public dissent,” Nick Shuhan, a 34-year-old editor and property manager who lives in Center City, said Tuesday. “So I stand with them.”
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