AFSCME DC 33 Strike: Media Brings in Academia to Convince Workers The Deal is Best They can Get

Richard Mellor

AFSCME Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

July 18, 2022

"It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality" (Business Week 10-12-74). Written at the very same time the conditions that led to the post-WW2 economic boom came to an end.

 

I posted an earlier commentary on the strike of municipal workers in Philadelphia, PA that ended ten days ago when the leadership of AFSCME District Council 33 reached a tentative agreement with the city.

 

There was considerable displeasure with the contract, even from the president of DC 33 Greg Boulware himself. DC33 represents numerous public sector workers including 911 dispatchers, sanitation workers, and medical examiners. But, as I wrote earlier, it is the sanitation workers that are key given their crucial role in keeping the city free of trash.

 

According to reports, the voting began on Monday of this week and lasts until the 20^th. I visited DC33’s website just now and can’t find any information about the ratification vote or the strike at all. As I pointed out in the earlier posting, suggestions by the president and the mass media that the workers could vote against the contract and be back on strike by the weekend, cannot be taken seriously. It’s very difficult to get workers back out once we’ve been led back in without seeing what was agreed to. A strike is a serious event and always a sacrifice for those that engage in it.

In addition, what motive is there if the leadership doesn’t present an alternative with a strategy and tactics for winning a better deal?  To be honest, there is no information on DC33’s website and certainly nothing about the possibility of going back on strike because the leadership has no plan if it’s voted down. Going back in is similar to these cooling off periods they use to head off steam and end strikes that the leadership know they have no real strategy for winning.

 

But what I want to point out here, is the role of the academic in the video above. The big business media, the role of which is to propagate pro-market, anti-union propaganda, drags in this academic to legitimize the capitulation of the union leadership and portray the deal as a victory. 

 

The academic, a Professor Francis Ryan, is a labor historian from Rutgers University and he thinks the contract is a good deal. He’s been “…..researching Philadelphia unions for years.” the news anchor tells us. One would think the professor would learn something that would help him lead to more accurate conclusions than he expresses here.

 

He can’t though because he won’t be invited again. This entire segment of local news is directed at any of the workers that might be tuning in. The esteemed management spokesperson, I mean professor, makes it clear, and it must be clear as he’s a professor of labor history at Rutgers: “I think that overall it is a good deal it is something that in today's political climate there is no money coming from Harrisburg, no money certainly coming from Washington, DC.”

 

How many times, my brothers and sisters out there on the picket lines and in the workplaces of America, have we heard that now is not the time, that the climate is not right, there is no money. The professor is just another mouthpiece for the big capitalists and the rotten clique that occupy the U.S. Congress. He’s not the only academic I have had to listen to in this mold; Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor, is another one.  There are alternatives in academia that would have a completely different analysis but CBS won’t seek them out.

 

The professor is there to put a lid on any ideas the workers have about escalating the conflict. And he is right that it is all they can get. It is all they can get if the leadership----and leaders do have responsibility-----continues to use tactics and an approach that has failed time and time again. They do not fight to win. 

Individual locals are left to fight global capitalism alone and none have that power. Behind the scenes it is the billionaire investors in real estate, technology, shipping, and other major industries along with their representatives in the two capitalist parties that control municipal bodies like Philadelphia City Council, not the voter.

 

On DC33’s website it boasts being affiliated with AFSCME International, my former union, with 1.6 million, members.  AFSCME is the union that “offers solidarity without conformity”, the site says, an obscure statement surely. Aside from the affiliation with a 1.6 million member organization, there are some 666,000 union members in Pennsylvania according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Where does solidarity begin and end? It has to be national and international if we want to drive back the capitalist offensive.

 

From the get go, the city used the courts to undermine union power and worker solidarity through injunctions, and the police, to enforce them. The union leadership whines about this and calls it unfair pleading with the bosses to be less aggressive and so on. Did they forget what Biden did to the rail workers? Or, what the bosses have done to us since the building of the first workers’ organization? Unions weren’t built by lawyers or filing lawsuits. Unions were illegal and they were built by challenging anti-worker laws on a mass scale, not meekly obeying them.

 

There are some 14 million workers in the U.S. who are organized in unions. This includes major industries and a public sector workforce that is close to 35% organized. Both political parties have been undermining that potential power and Trump will continue down that road apace.

 

The DC 33 strike had a lot of public support. On the Council’s website it points out that there is growing support for unions. But here’s the problem. The present leadership of organized labor is not prepared to mobilize the potential power of their members to actually win a strike, one that would win major concessions from the bosses in general.

 

The professor is right that there is no money coming from the state capital or the federal government. But that does not mean there is no money. The U.S. taxpayer has been fleeced of hundreds of billions of dollars in the market driven conflicts in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine alone. Never mind the trillions spent in the disastrous defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. is awash with cash. Forbes points out that the 400 richest people in the US are “……worth a record $5.4 trillion, up nearly $1 trillion from last year.”  

 

U.S. military spending represents about 12 percent of the US federal budget for fiscal year 2025. And from 2020 to 2024, the last five-year period for which full statistics are available, private firms have received $2.4 trillion in contracts from the Pentagon.That's approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4 trillion. The military offense contractors are raking in the profits. Even Elon Musk, the world's richest man, gets rich through taxpayer money and federal contracts.

 

Now, the reporter in the above video says that her full interview with the professor is at CBSPhiladelphia.com, but I didn’t find it. So maybe he points out what I do here, that there’s no shortage of money. It's simply spent elsewhere like never ending predatory wars, or in the bank accounts of the parasites in finance that do no work, but I doubt it. I am not a professor and I have no degrees, but like most workers we are well aware that if we stick together, if we unite, we can win. However, in this class struggle, we face a war on two fronts: one is against the bosses and their efforts to profit at our expense and the other is against the pro-market policies of the present union leadership. 

 

Because they worship the market and consider profit sacrosanct, the strategists of organized labor are incapable of mobilizing the potential power of their members and the working class as a whole in defense of our material well being. The danger of such a development getting out of their control is terrifying to them. At best, they view the unions as employment agencies with themselves as the CEO’s. They will, and they have, used the army of staff at their disposal to suppress any movement from below that threatens this relationship they’ve built with the bosses based on labor peace and teamwork.

 

Instead of organizing our power that is based in the workplace and our ability to bring the U.S. economy to a halt, the labor officialdom boasts of the growth and the millions of members they have merely as a source of revenue which contributes to their salaries, but also as a voting bloc. Their relationship with the Democratic Party is based on being able to turn out votes at election time and organized labor has donated billions to this party over the years and provides the ground forces for precinct walking and phone banking. AFSCME provided some 40,000 troops for Walter Mondale's failed presidential bid back in the 1980’s.

 

Organized labor has the resources to run our own candidates, to have our own party. A Pew poll in 2021 found that 87% of Americans believed that the government should play a role in ensuring clean air and water; 64% said it should ensure health insurance for everyone, and 43% said it should provide high-speed Internet access (WSJ 8-13/14-22). And the millions that have opted out of the electoral process altogether is a reflection of the disgust workers have with the two parties of Wall Street. Voting for the lesser evil, in any situation, is not inspiring to say the least. 

Meanwhile, let’s see what the DC33 workers' response to the tentative agreement is in a day or so. 

And I’ll end this commentary with a statement from some US workers 180 years ago:

"Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable.  Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves.  It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich."

 

-1840's appeal from New England laborers. Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192

AFSCME DC 33 Strike Over. Have the members seen the Tentative Agreement?

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

8-12-25

 

A quick comment on the Afscme strike in Philadalphia.

 

The strike by 9000 members of Afscme District Council 33 in Philadelphia ended last Wednesday after union leaders accepted the city’s last offer. The union represents numerous public sector workers including 911 dispatchers, sanitation workers and medical examiners. But it is the sanitation workers, garbage collectors and their crucial role that brought the full weight of the courts down on the strikers.

On the first day of the strike the city with a Democratic mayor had a judge order 911 dispatchers back to work to, “avoid delays in emergency response times and public health”, that back to work order also applied to water department workers. Another city injunction, “…prohibited DC33 picketers from blocking or obstructing access to municipal buildings”. Another court order prevented striking sanitation workers from “gathering in groups of more than eight, or standing within 10 feet of city property (which includes sanitation centers), or engaging in behavior deemed as intimidating or harassing.” This like the 1880’s folks.

Old Biden set a great precedent here with the rail workers didn’t he folks. The bosses use all the institutions at their disposal to crush strikes and the workers movement.  We need to take note of that.

What use is a strike that doesn’t stop production or the daily activity of business? But we’re used to these types of work stoppages organized by the moribund, class collaborators that are in control of our unions. Strikes today are simply 24-hour protests which get a little old after you’ve been out there for any length of time watching people cross your picket lines. The union hierarchy is very generous with coffee and donuts. Then when we are being effective and actually accomplish what strikes are supposed to accomplish, halt production, out come the injunctions followed by the batons.

One has to shake one’s head, or in modern lingo SMH, when representatives of the bosses’ institutions, their political parties or their media get their judicial system to intervene to smash a strike out of concern for the health and safety of the population as a whole; our access to medical care or water for example. In the US hundreds of thousands of people, workers and the poor, die through the lack of any decent health care system; the US has the worst health care system and the most expensive of all the industrialized countries. Do a little research and see how many “Americans’ in the Navajo nation have no water or electricity, never mind jobs.

I don’t know how many times I lied to my supervisor (and some of them knew I was lying and were OK with it) when I was sent to shut off water to a single mother with children who couldn’t pay the bill. The powers that be learned that promoting people in to management positions that came out of the trenches was not a good strategy.

The members of DC 33 went back to work immediately but still, as of this writing, have to vote on the contract which will take place next week. Many workers are unhappy with the tentative agreement that includes a 3% wage increase a year for three years. The union had demanded 8% a year over three years then, in the face of management’s intransigence retreated to 5% a year. According to the Philadelphia Enquirer, Members of DC 33 earn an average annual salary of $46,000, $2000 below the city’s “living wage”

The strike had considerable support among the public despite the inconvenience.
“Sanitation workers are providing ‘public infrastructure necessities’ and should get more than the “bare minimum,”, South Philly resident Ronald Jones told  BillyPenn, a local Philadelphia news outlet. Others agreed:

“I think a temporary in convenience for most of us worth it for those who deserve to be paid because they're not being paid enough to do a job that's a dirty job that nobody wants to do.” Says one of the residents in the video above.

“I know what it is to work and then your money can’t [be sufficient for] you to live,” another woman says, “So if they have to do what they have to do, then they have to do what they have to do. Like they have to come up with a solution. The city has the money, give them the money.”

The president of District Council 33, Greg Boulware is also unhappy with the contract and that the management threatened to take more after he made a concession on wages. He blamed the management for using the courts to break the strike as “bad faith”. One would think he might launch a ferocious attack on them but the further up the union hierarchy management ladder you go, the more they push the negotiations process as a gentleman’s exercise in problem solving and after all, we are on the same team as the boss. There is no such thing as good faith when it comes to this class conflict over the wages and working conditions of working people.

One might wonder why on earth the union leadership would end a strike and the workers return to work when the members have not yet seen the tentative agreement the leadership has accepted and had the chance to vote on it.

Here’s why that is the scenario. Even though the DC33 president suggests that if the members vote the tentative agreement down they might go back out on strike, it is highly unlikely and the president knows it. It’s hard to get that momentum back and union officials use this tactic all the time in order to get workers back on the job. Even so, on what basis will they go back out? What is in it for them? The leadership completely folded in the face of the bosses’ aggression so there’s likely little confidence that if they sacrifice more time, money and material well being they’ll get anything better. I won’t say it can’t happen but it’s unlikely. 

Why would the DC33 president be surprised that the boss went to the courts to render the work stoppage ineffective as a response to a very reasonable wage demand from the union? Does he not know what Biden did to the rail workers?

The leadership of DC 33 simply capitulated. They have no answer to this aggression and the boss knows it; they likely gave money to the mayor who is a Democrat. The employers throughout the nation do not fear the trade union leadership. They have learned over the past decades since the 1980’s when there was an attempt by some sectors of organized labor to counter the capitalist offensive under Carter and then Reagan, that our leaders will not fight to win.

There are some 666,000 union members in Pennsylvania according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I have been a retired Afscme member for 20 years but I think DC33 was the second largest District Council in the country. But what is the point of all this structure, if the potential power of this organized sector of workers is not mobilized against the employers? The Afscme, and the entire leadership of organized labor refuse to mobilize this power except when it’s time to get their friends in the Democratic Party in to office. 

Individual locals even major unions cannot beat the employers in isolation. They argue that the laws are against us, that if they do this or do that the courts will respond and take our treasuries or threaten jail time. Well unions were illegal and we had to violate anti-union laws to get them. Trump doesn’t care about the damn law. The railroad workers had every right to strike back in 2024 so Biden went to the legislature with Pelosi and got the US Congress to pass the paw to make their legal strike illegal overnight. No problem “reaching across the aisle” that day.

There was considerable tension between some of the strikers and the cops after the injunction to ban more than 8 people gathering within 10 feet of a site. After the injunction the police told picketers not to stop that resulted in some back and forth. From WHYY.org

“Then, a law enforcement officer with a sheriff’s badge handed out the court order and read it out loud to an increasingly rowdy crowd, who started shouting back, questioning their authority and sometimes swearing loudly.

“I understand your position, but we can’t let nobody in or out,” said one man who appeared to be a union striker but refused to identify himself.

As a crowd grew, then shrank before retreating across the street, phones were pulled out to record the situation.

“The cops get overtime,” somebody in the crowd shouted.

“We got families, we got kids. What the f—-?” said another person. “We’re not moving. Come on, let’s get serious.”

It’s the same old story and one of the reasons, despite the positive views on unions, that so many members are angry at the refusal of their leaders to go on the offensive. Workers end up on picket lines for weeks with very little to show for it.  The major cause for this capitulation in the face of the employer’s war against workers is their view that workers and bosses have the same interests, are on the same team. This is embodied in the Team Concept through management labor partnerships, interest based bargaining, quality circles and various other labor management join cooperation.

It’s no wonder worker are cautious about going out on strike. More often than not the worker is prepared to fight but the union hierarchy is not. We are faced with a war on two fronts. One is against the employers, but the other, a much harder one, is against the concessionary policies of our own leadership.