A second union for Philadelphia city workers is holding a strike authorization vote

A second union for Philadelphia city workers is holding a strike authorization vote, according to an email sent to members last week that was obtained by The Inquirer.

But it’s far from clear that leaders of that union — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 47, which represents white-collar city workers — are itching for an opportunity to walk off the job and join their colleagues in the much larger blue-collar union, AFSCME DC 33, on the picket line.

DC 47 is an umbrella union, and its structure is complicated. The council is made up of nine locals, but only two represent Philadelphia city workers under the executive branch. (The others represent workers in the courts and at educational and nonprofit institutions.)

And of those two municipal unions, only one is legally permitted to go on strike: Local 2187, which represents administrative assistants and professionals. The other, Local 2186, represents supervisors in various city agencies. (Only a handful of states allow supervisors to unionize, and they generally place limitations on them, such as Pennsylvania’s strike ban.)

In the July 1 email, Local 2187 president Jesse Jordan informed members that there will be three in-person voting opportunities, and that all votes will be counted by July 15. But unlike DC 33’s leadership, which enthusiastically encouraged members to authorize a strike, Jordan’s email said merely that the vote is being held due to requests from members.

“In response to the strong interest from our membership in moving forward with a strike authorization, we want to make sure that every member can stay informed and participate in the voting process,” Jordan wrote in the email, which has not been previously reported.

Jordan did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and DC 47’s leadership has been conspicuously quiet during DC 33’s strike. DC 47 president April Giggetts and vice president Robert Harris did not respond to requests for comment last week.

The last full-year contract between the city and DC 47 expired July 1, as was the case with DC 33. At that point, DC 33 immediately called a strike, the city’s first major work stoppage since 1986. DC 47, however, signed a two-week contract extension to allow negotiations to continue.

To go on strike, a union must hold a strike authorization vote, and it must not be working under a contract that prohibits a work stoppage. If members approve the strike authorization, DC 47 will be able to walk off the job around the time when the contract extension expires in mid-July — if leadership chooses to do so.

“Let’s remain strong, informed, and united,” Jordan wrote.

DC 33 and DC 47 have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, they have kinship as AFSCME siblings and rarely if ever criticize each other publicly. Their contracts typically include “most favored nations” clauses that allow one union to piggyback off the other if the second union to finish negotiations reaches a better deal.

But they also have very different constituencies, and their interests have diverged at key moments.

DC 47, which calls itself a “progressive union,” represents better-paid and more highly educated members who are seen as more liberal, especially on social issues. But DC 33 members, who are frontline workers like trash collectors and street pavers, are sometimes more willing to force confrontations with the city over demands for better pay.

In Philly labor circles, there is an expectation that DC 47 should wait for DC 33 to resolve its contract disputes before striking its own deals with the city, a show of solidarity meant to prevent lower-paid colleagues from being undermined by a divide-and-conquer strategy.

Violations of that unwritten rule have been turning points in the past. During the 1986 strike, DC 33 and DC 47 walked off the job simultaneously, and DC 47 president Thomas Paine Cronin made headlines with colorful rhetoric, at one point calling Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr. a “scab mayor.”

But Cronin then surprisingly struck a deal with Goode 11 days into the strike in a move that was seen as undermining the position of DC 33, which stayed out for an additional week and a half before accepting terms similar to what DC 47 negotiated.

And at the end of a five-year standoff with Mayor Michael A. Nutter’s administration — in which three unions worked on the terms of expired contracts but did not strike — DC 47 was the first to agree to a new deal in February 2014. DC 33 followed suit six months later, and the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 22, the most bitterly opposed to Nutter, finally reached a deal in 2015, the last year of his administration.