More DC 33 members are ordered back to work as another city injunction request is granted
The latest court order concerns airport emergency response workers. In the union's last major work stoppage in 1986, sanitation workers were ultimately ordered back to work by a judge.
Contract negotiations resumed between city officials and the leaders of its largest municipal union Tuesday but, lacking a deal, trash continued to pile up in Philadelphia’s streets. And in the courts, so did the injunctions.
A Tuesday ruling sent back to work eight more members of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The eight workers staff the Philadelphia airports’ emergency response system.
Common Pleas Court Judge Sierra Thomas-Street, who had already approved four injunction requests calling union members back to work, granted the city’s petition to order eight of the 22 dispatchers represented by DC 33 to return to work to allow for safe staffing levels at Terminal Control 3111, the system that serves as the 911 equivalent for Philadelphia International Airport and Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
Non-DC 33 airport staffers, pulled from their regular duties, had been working 12-hour shifts to fill the gap, city attorney Samuel Ritterman said at a hearing Tuesday. Fatigue was building up, making the response less efficient, Ritterman said.
“In emergency situations when any second matters, that’s not acceptable,” Ritterman said. The system responded to 2,539 emergency calls last year, according to court filings.
Thomas-Street ruled that the eight dispatchers would report back to their shifts starting at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. Recent events locally and nationally have demonstrated the catastrophic potential of an aviation-related incident, the judge said when issuing her ruling.
“Hindsight is 20/20,” Thomas-Street said, “but it won’t be my hindsight.”
A hearing on a petition filed Monday night by the city asking the court to hold DC 33 and its president, Greg Boulware, in contempt for violation of a court order limiting picketing was rescheduled for Thursday.
The 311 dispatchers are the fourth group of workers ordered by Thomas-Street to return to work, joining some water treatment workers, medical examiner’s office employees, and 911 call center dispatchers. The injunction prohibiting the work stoppage of most 911 dispatchers was originally set for a week, but the judge extended it indefinitely.
» READ MORE: Sleeping on cots, 24/7 shifts, and double time: How Philly is keeping water clean during the DC 33 strike
Sanitation workers, however, remained on strike Tuesday, the eighth day of DC 33’s first major work stoppage in nearly 40 years. But if history is any indicator, injunctions — not negotiations — might be what puts them back on the job.
In the 1986 strike, Common Pleas Court Judge Edward Blake issued a return-to-work order that forced sanitation workers back on the job nearly three weeks after the stoppage began, according to reports from the time. Workers initially ignored the order and stayed on the picket line, but the resistance was short-lived.
A day after issuing the order, Blake found the union in contempt and threatened a $40,000-per-day fine if workers did not return. Members, meanwhile, reportedly faced termination if they did not abide by the order. Under those ultimatums, DC 33 sanitation workers began cleaning up about 45,000 tons of trash that had accumulated on Philadelphia’s streets during the stoppage.
Several days after the judge issued his order, DC 33 leaders reached an agreement with the city, officially ending the work stoppage, according to Inquirer and Daily News reports.
In total, the sanitation workers’ 1986 strike lasted about 20 days — more than twice the length of the current work stoppage. But while this strike has not reached that length, its most visible effects — the so-called Parker piles of trash at the city’s temporary drop-off sites, named after Mayor Cherelle L. Parker — are nonetheless increasingly an issue.
Last week, Crystal Jacobs Shipman, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Sanitation, said the dumpsters would be “serviced multiple times a day,” but challenges like traffic and limited parking might “cause occasional delays.” This week, that appeared to still be the case.
City Councilmember Anthony Phillips told The Inquirer on Tuesday that the city was supposed to be collecting trash “multiple times a day” but that he had not seen this occurring at every trash site.
“From what I’ve been told and seen, I’ve not seen the level of multiple times a day, and that could be due to a lot of things happening,” Phillips said. “Their equipment that they need, workers, they’ve had some challenges when it comes to vandalism.”
Phillips, whose 9th Council District covers parts of Northwest Philadelphia, said Tuesday that “across the board, we are seeing an unprecedented amount of trash in our district that we are not used to.”
Neither the city nor the union had given a public update as of Tuesday evening indicating when the strike might abate or how negotiations were going. Parker again made no public appearances Tuesday. On Monday, DC 33’s Boulware indicated little progress had been made. Along with wages, several sticking points remained, Carlton Williams, who directs the Philadelphia Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, said Monday.
“They are offering exactly the same as what they’ve been doing,” Boulware said. “Now we’ve modified and modified and modified our adjustment trying to actually meet with them in good faith and have some conversation.”
Staff writers Sean Collins Walsh and Fallon Roth contributed to this article.