Thousands of Philadelphia city workers are officially on strike

The Philadelphia city worker strike of 2025 has begun.

Greg Boulware, president of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called for an immediate and indefinite work stoppage of the more than 9,000 municipal employees he represents after contract negotiations with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration fell apart late Monday night.

Boulware delivered the news at exactly midnight to his negotiating team, which burst out in applause at the Community College of Philadelphia’s Career and Advanced Technology Center in West Philadelphia, where Monday evening’s negotiations took place.

“We’re officially on strike due to the fact that we could not reach terms that we felt were adequate for our members to move forward,” Boulware said in an interview.

» READ MORE: District Council 33 is on strike. Here’s what the union does and what could be impacted.

As Boulware was exiting the building, City Solicitor Renee Garcia personally served him and a union attorney with an injunction through which the city will ask a judge to require certain Philadelphia Water Department employees to return to work.

The injunction, which was filed early Tuesday morning, says the city needs a “limited number” of PWD employees to return to work to fulfill “its mandate to provide fresh, clean drinking water and wastewater treatment.”

In an interview shortly after midnight, Parker said she was disappointed to learn DC 33 turned down the city’s last contract proposal.

“It was our best offer, our final offer, and we did the best that we could,” Parker said. “It’s very unfortunate but we remain willing and able to continue having conversations with District Council 33 in the hopes that we will find a way to reach some compromise. However, my job right now … is to ensure that the city of Philadelphia continues to provide services that our residents deserve and expect.”

Boulware’s decision kicks off the first major strike of city workers since the DC 33 “trash strike” in 1986, and this year’s iteration may have much in common with that year’s three-week shutdown, which saw garbage piling up at city-designated drop-off centers in the summer heat.

Trash collection will stop Tuesday. Some public pools will be shut down. Emergency 911 call center wait times are likely to lengthen. And other city services will be strained in the days ahead of Philadelphia’s high-profile July Fourth celebrations.

Boulware’s move dramatically increases the stakes of the already-tense negotiations between Parker’s team and DC 33, the lowest-paid of Philly’s four major municipal unions and the only one in which a majority of members are Black. The talks have largely focused on the schedule of pay raises Boulware is attempting to win for his members, who make an average annual salary of $46,000 and who, Boulware said, have been undervalued by successive mayors.

The final negotiations between the union and city took place Monday night at the technical school building in West Philadelphia. DC 33 officials gathered on the third floor and ordered takeout while they waited for talks to unfold. Administration officials prepped on the second floor. Boulware kept both sides waiting for hours for his arrival, which didn’t come until around 10 p.m.

The city’s negotiating team, led by Chief Deputy Mayor Sinceré Harris, joined DC 33 leaders in their conference room around 11 p.m. and departed 30 minutes later.

At 11:37 p.m., Harris and Boulware met briefly outside the conference room to speak one on one as lawyers looked on. Harris had her hands on her hips as she appealed to the union leader, who leaned against a wall nonchalantly.

“We don’t trust you to care for our health and welfare [fund],” Boulware could be heard saying at one point, an apparent reference to a change Parker had proposed to how the union’s healthcare benefits would be administered.

They parted minutes later with Harris saying, “We’ll get back to you ASAP” on questions the union had asked about the city’s latest offer.

The work stoppage comes despite both sides inching toward each other in the final days of talks and despite Parker’s offer to continue negotiating.

“We are prepared to stay at the table as long as it takes,” Parker said Monday.

The administration started by proposing a four-year deal with raises of 2% each year. By Monday night, Parker was offering a three-year deal with raises of 2.75%, 3%, and 3%, Boulware said — plus the addition of an extra step in the DC 33 pay scale, which would be lucrative for longtime employees.

Boulware began by asking for four years of 8% raises. On Monday night, his final offer to the city was 5% annual raises for his members, he said.

Boulware called for the strike to begin on the first day after the expiration of DC 33’s previous contract, an unusual and aggressive tactic for a municipal union. City workers have worked on the terms of expired contracts many times in the past, and they are typically paid retroactively for the wages they lost during the strike, including any raises negotiated in the new deal.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia braces for major city worker union strike as contract talks continue and deadline draws nearer

DC 33, for instance, worked without a contract and without going on strike for five years during a dispute with former Mayor Michael A. Nutter.

But Boulware, who assumed his role after a bruising union leadership fight that ended last year, was determined to secure a contract that would provide life-changing raises for his members. He took an aggressive stance well before negotiations fell apart by holding a strike authorization vote two weeks ago that he said 95% of DC 33 members supported.

Parker also helped to increase the anticipation for this year’s negotiations. Philadelphia mayors traditionally negotiate four-year contracts with all four major municipal unions during their first year in office. When Parker took office last January, however, she pushed for them to accept one-year deals that largely extended the terms of the previous contracts, which were negotiated under former Mayor Jim Kenney, while offering significant across-the-board raises.

Under Boulware’s leadership, DC 33 resisted for months and only agreed after threatening to strike and securing a 5% across-the-board raise, the union’s largest single-year pay increase in three decades.

During this year’s talks, Parker has contended that historic pay bump should be considered as part of her administration’s investments in DC 33 during her first term. Her current offer and last year’s 5% amount to around 13% in raises over her first four years, the largest cumulative raises any mayor in the last 30 years has agreed to give the union in a single term. (The previous high mark in that timeframe was 11.5% in combined raises under one of Kenney’s terms.)

But Boulware said the one-year deal was only a start, arguing that his members needed many years of raises of 5% or more in order to be able to afford a decent quality of life in the city they serve and keep up with the increasing cost of living.

The unions for police officers and firefighters are prohibited from striking by state law, and their contracts will be decided in the coming months by a process known as binding interest arbitration.

AFSCME’s District Council 47, which represents about 3,000 white collar city workers including supervisors and professionals, has signed a brief contract extension with the city to allow its negotiations to continue. It was not immediately clear how DC 47 will react to their DC 33 colleagues’ work stoppage.

Parker emphasized Monday that a DC 33 strike would not threaten public safety because the city will reassign non-striking workers to key roles, such as having police officers staff the 911 call center. Independence Day proceedings will proceed as scheduled, she said.