DC 33 made concessions in 1992. Decades of resentment since led to Philadelphia’s current city worker strike.

How far back in Philadelphia history does one have to go to understand this year’s city worker strike?

The 2023 mayor’s race? That’s when District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — the largest, lowest-paid municipal union for city workers, and the one currently on strike — endorsed Jeff Brown, a ShopRite proprietor who had never run for office.

The endorsement came as a shock and it helped spark a chain reaction of events in Philly labor and politics that culminated last year in the union’s selection of a new leader, Greg Boulware, who was always likely to have a strained relationship with the ultimate winner of that election, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker.

» READ MORE: Thousands of Philadelphia city workers are officially on strike

How about 2009? That was the start of the union’s five-year standoff with former Mayor Michael A. Nutter and an extended wage freeze that many DC 33 members feel set them back years.

There are numerous moments in time that could help explain the current work stoppage, going back to the union’s October 1938 strike, a milestone in the history of Black political organizing in Philadelphia.

But for Boulware, the most relevant is Oct. 6, 1992, when his predecessor James Sutton signed a contract with then-Mayor Ed Rendell’s administration that DC 33 members and leaders curse to this day.

“It started creating a lack of parity for our members from that point on,” Boulware said. “If you don’t know your history, you’re bound to repeat it, and I’ve been paying attention.”

The concessions Rendell won from DC 33 and other municipal unions amid the city’s early ’90s fiscal crisis are a key part of his frequently celebrated legacy as mayor. But among most DC 33 members and leaders, it was one of the darkest chapters in the union’s history. And the memory of it is key to understanding Boulware’s motivation to call a strike at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday — the first minute he was legally allowed to — despite the Parker administration’s offer to continue negotiations.

“What I learned is that, unfortunately, you have to be an active participant in the change you want to see,” he said Wednesday. “At some point in time, you’re going to have to plant your feet. When you don’t, when you waver … you’re going to be kicking yourself, and years and years go by, and your position is only going to get worse.”

To be sure, history is not the only explanation for why Philadelphia is in the midst of its first major municipal strike since 1986, and the course of events was not predetermined. Parker and Boulware’s personalities — they are both more strong-willed and less flexible than some of their recent predecessors — have proven to be a combustible combination.

» READ MORE: What Philly’s garbage strike of 1986 looked like

The political landscape in Philadelphia and elsewhere has also changed from the neoliberal 1990s, with the rise of the national progressive movement and displays of appreciation for frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic, giving union leaders more confidence the public will have their backs.

“We had a viable youth-based socialist movement that’s coming out of the 2016 presidential election with Bernie Sanders,” said Francis Ryan, a Rutgers University labor historian who has written a book on DC 33. “That’s why you’re hearing so much support for Council 33 in ways that I have not seen in the historical record since 1938.”

Just as importantly, the city’s finances, while still precarious, have improved dramatically since the 1990s, and union leaders know the city is in a better position to afford demands to increase pay. (In contract negotiations this year, the mayor’s administration has stressed that President Donald Trump’s threatened cuts to federal funding could devastate the city budget. Boulware was unmoved.)

But the question of why more than 9,000 city workers are now on strike is worth asking — because the timing of Boulware’s decision to call the work stoppage, halting trash pickup and straining many city services, was not inevitable.

When Boulware cut off negotiations, he and Parker were making progress and had closed what was once a 6-percentage-point gap in the annual raises DC 33 members were hoping to secure to a difference of just over 2 percentage points. There was also no reason talks had to end when DC 33’s contract with the city expired at midnight Monday; it has become standard practice for mayors and unions to keep negotiating after previous contracts expire, as the other three major municipal unions are doing now.

But when the city did not agree to at least a 5% raise for his members, Boulware knew what he wanted to do. And his motivation stemmed, in part, from the 1992 contract. Many DC 33 members have been itching for the union’s leaders to take a dramatic stand against the city for the last 33 years.

On Tuesday, at 12:01 a.m., they got their wish.

From the structure of the city budget to the tax policies mayors have embraced for decades, modern Philadelphia City Hall politics in many ways can be divided into two eras: before and after Rendell.

Nowhere is that more true than at DC 33.

Rendell, who was elected in 1991 and navigated the city around a four-year $1.4 billion deficit, is credited with saving Philadelphia from becoming the first major U.S. city to declare bankruptcy, a distinction that fell to Detroit in 2013.

One of the most dramatic moments in that well-documented history is the contract Rendell’s administration signed with DC 33 in 1992 while securing $374 million in labor savings over four years. The deal froze wages for two years, created a new, less-lucrative pension plan, and greatly increased the city’s power to manage employees’ schedules, job descriptions, and performance — and to lay them off.

A state Supreme Court decision in September of that year cleared the way for Rendell to impose contract terms during an impasse in negotiations, giving the mayor significant leverage.

That left Sutton, DC 33’s then-president, with no good options. And after a largely symbolic 14-hour strike that few thought could succeed, he signed a deal with few changes from Rendell’s last offer.

“The mayor probably got 90% of what he wanted,” said then-City Council President John F. Street, who succeeded Rendell as mayor.

The Inquirer reported at the time that the contract with DC 33 was “a major step toward restoring the city’s battered finances.”

The union’s executive board approved it in a 15-6 vote. Sutton said he was “very satisfied” with the deal. One of the dissenters on the union’s board, Herman “Pete” Matthews, told reporters it was a “terrible contract.”

Matthews went on to challenge — and defeat — Sutton in the union’s 1996 election, capitalizing on members’ frustration with the contract. He held the DC 33 presidency for a remarkable 24 years, fending off four challenges from Sutton’s widow, Evon, often by reminding members that her husband had caved to Rendell.

Surprisingly, Evon Sutton is now known as a leader of the wing of DC 33 that has sought a more combative approach to the city. She said in an interview Wednesday that her husband’s actions in 1992 had been misrepresented in subsequent years without the context of the financial crisis and Rendell’s threats to privatize large swaths of the city workforce, including trash collectors.

“The reason he took that ’92 contract with the givebacks was to keep people from being laid off,” she said. “There was nothing weak about him.”

Matthews eventually lost the DC 33 presidency in 2020 to Ernest Garrett, who campaigned in part on fighting the city more aggressively. After taking office, Garrett named Evon Sutton as his political director.

DC 33’s endorsement of Brown, the ShopRite proprietor, in the early days of the 2023 mayor’s race seemed to come out of left field to many outside the union. And it didn’t sit well with some officials within the district council.

That included Omar Salaam, who was a leader of the sanitation workers’ Local 427 and had been an ally of Matthews’. In early May, Salaam’s local and another broke with the rest of DC 33 to endorse Parker, a dramatic move that boosted her campaign at a critical moment.

Brown ran on a “Pick up the damn trash” campaign slogan, and union members supporting Parker poked fun at the line, wearing neon T-shirts reading, “We do pick up the trash.” After a series of setbacks, Brown finished fifth in the Democratic primary, which Parker won before coasting to victory in November.

On the campaign trail, she touted her ability to negotiate and forge unlikely alliances, which she had done as a state legislator in GOP-controlled Harrisburg.

After taking office, Parker conspicuously embraced Salaam and other officials from the unions that endorsed her. She invited them to stand at the podium with her — without Garrett — at a news conference she held on the city’s response to a snowstorm, an unusual appearance for the leaders of locals and not the district council.

In February 2024, Garrett was removed from DC 33 leadership after Salaam and others accused him of spending money without the approval of the union’s executive board. The board then elected Salaam, leader of the sanitation workers’ union, to serve the remaining months left in Garrett’s term.

Salaam told The Inquirer at the time he planned to do everything “by the book” to “stabilize” DC 33.

A close partnership with DC 33 leadership fit perfectly with Parker’s ambitious agenda to make the city “clean and green” and retire the moniker “Filthadelphia.”

But months later, Boulware, an ally of Garrett’s, ran against Salaam in a bitterly contested election that at one point devolved into a physical altercation between the two that drew a police response.

In June 2024, Boulware defeated Salaam, whom Parker has since hired for a job in the sanitation department. Boulware then rehired Evon Sutton as the union’s political director.

“I owe everything to this union, and I believe that [union leaders] owe it to the people to fight for them,” Sutton said. “Greg is that person.”

The stage was set for DC 33’s aggressive negotiating stance and the current strike.

Boulware campaigned, in part, on a promise to oppose Parker’s request that all of the city’s municipal unions sign one-year contract extensions, rather than traditional multiyear deals, during her first year in office to allow her administration to find its footing.

He resisted for months longer than the other three municipal unions, and even threatened to strike. Boulware ultimately agreed to the short-term deal after securing a 5% raise for DC 33 members.

It was the union’s largest single-year increase since before the 1992 contract.

Parker appears to have viewed that as a down payment on this year’s talks, in which she has so far offered annual raises of no more than 3%. Boulware, by contrast, is framing the 5% mark as a starting point — and now, days into the strike, both sides are waiting for the other to capitulate.

“I want nothing more than for us to reach a fair and fiscally responsible agreement,” Parker said Tuesday, “and President Boulware understands that.”