How Mayor Parker’s administration approached contract talks — and eventually a tentative agreement — with AFSCME DC 47
The mayor announced the second contract with a city union in less than a week. She alluded to recent displays of “intensity.”
For the second time in a week, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stood with her team at a podium at the Mayor’s Reception Room in City Hall on Wednesday, announcing that Philadelphia had reached a tentative three-year contract agreement with a municipal workers union.
This time, a strike was averted before it could even start. And Parker called the deal “good news.”
“I know the last several weeks have been very long for all of us,” Parker said.
The city reached a tentative deal Tuesday with District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents thousands of white-collar city workers across several departments, including those at the library and the office of homeless services.
It marked the second prospective deal brokered with a city workers union in less than a week, and a negotiation process far less contentious than the one with AFSCME District Council 33, which led to a tumultuous eight-day strike by more than 9,000 blue-collar municipal employees in the lowest-paid city union.
The tentative agreement must be ratified by DC 47’s members to take effect. DC 47 president April Gigetts said Tuesday she hopes the vote will take place over the next week.
DC 47’s three-year tentative contract includes annual wage increases of 2.5%, 3%, and 3%. It also includes a 1% fifth-step pay increase and a one-time $1,250 bonus, as well as reforms to give wage boosts to longtime employees and those who work second or third shifts. Under the tentative contract, union members will also see improvements on the city’s contributions to their healthcare claims, which both the city and union see as a priority to protect workers amid federal threats to healthcare funding.
Parker said that combined with the one-time 5% raise she gave DC 47 employees in a contract extension last year, the new contract amounts to a 13.5% wage increase for the union’s members over her four-year term. The deal, if ratified, will cost the city approximately $92 million over the course of five years, the city said. In this year’s budget, Parker set aside $550 million to cover the costs of new labor contracts. DC 33’s three-year agreement, with 3% annual raises for workers, will cost the city $115 million.
DC 47 is an umbrella union comprising nine locals, two of which — Locals 2186 and 2187 — represent city employees. Local 2187 is the only one allowed to go on strike. Its membership, which consists of city employees and workers at the Philadelphia Housing Authority and Philadelphia Parking Authority, participated last week and over the weekend in a now-moot strike authorization vote that would have been tallied Tuesday.
While the wage increases in the latest contract fall short of DC 47’s initial demands for 8% over four years, Gigetts said Tuesday she thinks members will be “pleased” with the deal.
Parker: Contract deals are part of a ‘larger equation’
Earlier this month, failed negotiations between the city and DC 47’s sister union, DC 33, resulted in Philadelphia’s first major strike by municipal workers since 1986, leading to piling trash and resentment from residents as city services stalled and tempers flared between city and union leadership.
Parker said Wednesday the “intensity” on recent display is not indicative of the months of negotiations and conversations between the city and union leaders.
As the city continues to hash out long-term agreements for the 22,000 municipal employees across the four unions whose contracts expired July 1, Parker said “competing interests” are at play.
“It’s all a part of a larger equation in long-term sort of thinking,” Parker said, emphasizing that she puts a priority on fiscal responsibility.
» READ MORE: ‘They are my people’: Mayor Cherelle Parker on why she stood firm in the DC 33 city worker strike
Parker approached talks with DC 33 and DC 47 in fundamentally the same way, with some differences in negotiators at the bargaining table, based on their experience.
When it came to DC 47, tensions appeared to escalate Friday when the union walked away from the bargaining table after nine hours of negotiations with no date to return. But the situation seemed to calm down days later, after an all-night negotiating session stretching Monday into Tuesday, when the tentative agreement was reached.
“You get at a point where you just have to walk away and wait and see if they want to take you seriously,” Gigetts said over the weekend.
In contrast to DC 33’s approach of calling a strike at 12:01 a.m. on July 1, Gigetts never seemed dead set on calling for a work stoppage and remained open to other options, such as another contract extension.
» READ MORE: How the AFSCME DC 33 strike exposed fault lines in Philly’s labor movement
Gigetts said Tuesday that the parts of the deal outside the wage increases, such as improvements to health and welfare and the longevity schedule and shift differentials — which would offer some members pay increases — ultimately made the agreement “a pretty good contract.”
If Parker had her way, the mayor said Wednesday, she would “give everybody 10% across the board for every year,” but given the city’s budget, she said, that increase would have to come with layoffs to the municipal workforce.
“That’s not an option for me,” Parker said. “We will not lay off members of our valuable city workforce.”
Navigating federal threats to healthcare
Beginning in the third year of the DC 47 contract, the city will pay 92% of an employee’s healthcare claim, up from 91%, a move that both Parker and the union’s president said was made with impending federal threats to healthcare in mind.
Parker said the shift was “in the context of all of the Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians who we know are going to be impacted by legislative initiatives being proffered at the federal level.”
President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation, signed into law on July 4, includes drastic funding cuts to Medicaid, which insures one in four Pennsylvanians.
Gigetts, the DC 47 president, said a major goal during contract negotiations was to maintain a “strong, healthy health and welfare fund.”
“And so we think we will be able to achieve that with this contract,” Gigetts said.
Next up: The city must reach contract deals with Philadelphia police, firefighters, and prisons bargaining units.