Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard

Medical Examiner’s Office employees are ordered back to work after bodies piled up in storage during strike

The District Council 33 strike increases the risk that bodies remain in homes and outdoors during hot summer days, conditions that accelerate decomposition, city attorneys said.

The sign on the public entrance to the City of Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office in 2021.
The sign on the public entrance to the City of Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office in 2021.Read moreTOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

A judge ordered all 31 District Council 33 members working at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office to return to their jobs in response to a lawsuit by the city that said dead bodies were piling up in storage, posing a health and safety risk.

Attorneys representing District Council 33 did not object during a hearing Thursday on the city’s injunction request before Common Pleas Court Judge Sierra Thomas-Street.

The 31 workers ordered to return to work include death and forensic investigators, forensic technicians, and clerks. Their duties include assisting in death investigations, obtaining records from hospitals and first responders, locating legal next of kin, and transporting bodies, according to court records.

The city filed its lawsuit and injunction request on Thursday morning, the third day of the largest municipal workers strike in decades. Court filings said a backlog in the examination and transportation of dead bodies could result in the medical examiner’s office exceeding its storage capacity.

The number of cadavers stored at the office should not exceed 160 at a time, city attorneys said in the petition to the court, but as of Tuesday morning the office stored more than 180. And the backlog has gotten worse since, threatening a failure of the refrigeration system due to over-storage.

The city made contingency plans for a strike, but there is no way to replace the DC 33 members with contractors because of a web of state certifications and other trainings required to work with cadavers, Frank Wehr, a divisional deputy city solicitor, said at the hearing.

The medical examiner’s office “is currently being run by something less than a skeleton crew,” Wehr said. “There is simply no way to keep the volume in a safe and dignified manner.”

DC 33 members are also in charge of transporting bodies from people’s homes, Wehr said. The work stoppage increases the risk that bodies remain in homes and outdoors during hot summer days, conditions that accelerate decomposition.

“As the bodies decompose, their presence also attracts multiple types of insects and rodents who feed on the dead tissue,” Lindsay Simon, Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner, said in a declaration accompanying the lawsuit. “These vectors themselves also serve as potentially dangerous carriers of bacterial and viral illnesses.”

The strike also caused public safety concerns because of its impact on homicide investigations, the court filings say. The medical examiner’s office investigated 1,519 accidental deaths and 297 homicides in 2024. A component of those investigations is testing for toxic or illicit substances, Simon said. But as time from the death passes, the toxicological evidence degrades.

“Without prompt death investigations, the Philadelphia Police Department will be deprived of key evidence needed when investigating these crimes or potential crimes, as will the District Attorney’s Office when they must decide what criminal charges if any to level,” Simon said.

City Solicitor Renee Garcia said at a news conference Thursday that understaffing at the medical examiner’s office leads to delays in death investigations and the issuing of death certificates “and ultimately the delay in returning the remains of the deceased to their loved ones who are trying to lay them to rest.”

Samuel Spear, a labor attorney with Spear Wilderman representing the union, told the judge that he “can’t argue in good faith” against the request.

Spear did remind the judge that union members have a constitutional right to strike and argued that any injunction should be as narrow as possible.

Unionized employees were to begin reporting to work as of 3 p.m. Thursday. They are not prohibited from participating in pickets when they are not on the clock.

The injunction is the fourth issued by Thomas-Street during the strike. She previously ordered most 911 dispatchers and some water plant workers to return to work. The judge also placed limits on picketing activities.

Overall, including the medical examiner’s office workers, 340 DC 33 members have been prohibited from participating in the work stoppage. They represent less than 4% of all DC 33 municipal workers.

And while no other injunctions are pending, it is possible more will come if the strike continues.

On the 16th day of the infamous “trash strike” of 1986, a judge ordered sanitation workers to return to work, citing piling garbage as a health and safety risk.

AFSCME District Council 33 president Greg Boulware said Wednesday that he had been tied up with the barrage of legal actions Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration filed in the hours after the work stoppage began.

“We are still on strike,” Boulware said. “The only thing that’s changed is the city has wasted valuable time they could have spent negotiating with us. Instead they decided to file a bunch of injunctions.”

The union leader, who refused the city’s request to return to the negotiating table Thursday, said the injunctions prove that DC 33 members are irreplaceable and should be better compensated

“Our men and women are the best and brightest,” he said. “They proved that by filing injunctions that have our very men and women sent back to work.”

Staff writers Sean Collins Walsh and Fallon Roth contributed to this article.