SUMMER 2026
ISSUE 07

₁ There is a material element to this connection too. Philly’s major private waste-removal contract is with Waste Management, Inc., a company rife with Trump cronies, including megadonor Anthony Lomangino and Postmaster General David Steiner.

₂ This was essentially an attempt to truncate Philly’s existing fiscally and environmentally irresponsible waste management process, whereby trash collected during door-to-door municipal pickup is deposited at sanitation centers and exported to other communities by private haulers.

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In July of 2025, Philadelphia’s blue-collar municipal workers took to the picket lines for the first time in a generation. It’s a common refrain that Philly is a union town, but it is more than this. Philadelphia’s 1835 general strike was the first in the United States, and it won the ten-hour workday. Its 1910 strike of streetcar operators attracted 100,000 sympathy strikers, making Philly one of only two US cities with multiple general strikes under its belt. In the spirit of Philadelphia’s heroic labor history, the 2025 American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 33 strike touched every aspect of urban life due to the broadly essential nature of municipal labor and received extensive support from the public and civil society. It was the culmination of a decade of resurgence in labor’s power. But when the executive board of District Council 33 (DC33) saw their leverage threatened by injunctions and other structural factors, they took a deal that preserved member benefits and working conditions while going without wage increases badly needed by the majority of the municipal workforce making under $50,000, the minimum living wage for a single person in Philadelphia.

The deal was not especially disappointing in context. To have achieved a tactical victory in a public sector strike during a high-water mark of right-wing power in the United States is no small feat. But historical context does not make the pill easier to swallow. The 2025 contract, which kept DC33 members at wages below the cost of living, was obviously insufficient. The city’s injunctions, which hypocritically cited the essential nature of our work as a justification to send us back to our jobs without the compensation we struck for, were obviously unjust. The gains secured by the union through compromise came at the cost of the frustration of many members, who simply and righteously believe that somehow, something more could have been done to secure a more decisive victory.

Given the history of working-class militancy in Philadelphia, it is instructive to analyze how workers might bridge the gulf between the growing but insufficient militancy of the 21st-century labor movement and the kind of mass, coordinated, society-wide action that is increasingly needed to reverse the declining fortunes of the working class.

Riding the tailwind of rising industrial unionism, Philadelphia’s municipal workers executed a successful one-week strike not only by exercising their collective power in walking off the job but also by contesting the state’s monopoly on force by mobilizing to physically prevent strikebreakers from facilitating waste collection. Over the course of the strike, hundreds of workers and their supporters surrounded sanitation depots and ambushed scab convoys in spite of their police escorts. The largest battles numbered upwards of 400 people, with the wives of striking workers arrested while blocking sanitation centers and workers’ children engaging in sabotage – slashing tires, chasing horses, and diverting police attention. Trash piles were used to block vehicular access to strategically significant streets. When the conditions in some melees turned against the strikers, residents covered their retreat, allowing strikers into their homes to shelter from the police. For every dozen strikers arrested, more would escape and continue their disruptions elsewhere. This forceful, illegal contestation of power was the most decisive factor in the strike’s success. Municipal workers have reaped the fruits of that bravery ever since.

The passage of the Pennsylvania Public Employee Bargaining Law in 1970 opened the door for the unionization of professionals. More than 2,000 of the city’s supervisors, social workers, inspectors, medical professionals, and librarians became affiliated with AFSCME and formed District Council 47 (DC47). In 1978, after Rizzo attempted to pay for police bonuses with money allocated to the streets department, the two unions struck together for the first time. Trash piles in South Philly stretched for 200 yards and reached heights of eight feet. Results were inconclusive; Rizzo paid for the 7 percent raises demanded by the unions with the layoffs of several hundred workers.

After Rizzo, Philadelphia’s neoliberal mayors would definitively turn the tide on municipal unionism. Wilson Goode, who emerged from the opposition to Rizzo to become the city’s first Black mayor, was elected with the help of organized labor, but his loyalties lay with organized business. After taking office, Goode turned on the unions and blamed workers for poor city services. Using evidence of corruption as justification, Goode demanded oversight of the union-controlled health and welfare fund. Stout boldly counterproposed an increase in the city’s contribution to the fund, setting the stage for a strike. When DC33 and DC47 walked off the job together on July 1, 1986, Goode responded aggressively, riding a national wave of antiunion sentiment. He prepared contingency plans months in advance to keep the most essential services running by mobilizing supervisors as strikebreakers and centralizing command of city operations.

Goode scored a public relations victory on July 4, when the city’s Independence Day concert and festivities went on as planned. The first cracks in labor’s united front began to show on the ninth day of the strike, when DC47 accepted a separate peace. Having already conceded to a city audit of their healthcare, the progressive social unionist and newly elected DC47 president Thomas Paine Cronin negotiated for 10 percent raises over two years and an amnesty clause for white-collar municipal workers who refused to cross the picket lines of their union siblings. Backed by injunctions, Goode threatened to privatize the sanitation department, provoking a rank-and-file mutiny in DC33 that forced Stout to sign a deal with similar terms on July 22. Despite Cronin’s smart maneuvering and outspoken support for the strike after securing a deal for his members, his separate bargaining laid the foundations for animosity between the two AFSCME councils that continues to this day. If the public’s backing of the 1938 strike propelled it to success, the public’s disdain for the 1986 strike, fueled by the fears of urban decay and myths of union greed and corruption that defined the reactionary ’80s, doomed it to failure.

By the early ’90s, a decade of tax cuts and the diversion of federal funds from cities left Philadelphia with a severe budget deficit, leading to declines in the quality of city services. An acute environmental crisis brought on by the slashing of sanitation budgets and a shortage of local landfills was choking the city streets with trash. New mayor Ed Rendell set out to cripple the power of municipal labor in the name of financial solvency. Rendell took the scalpel to a city budget on track for bankruptcy and sought to excise part of it to save the whole. He made following through on Goode’s trash privatization threats a pillar of his campaign platform.

At the outset of negotiations in 1992, city lawyers handed union leaders a 75-page binder of concession demands, saying they’d accept no less than $110 million in savings. Union leadership rejected this aggressive posture as bad faith bargaining and began to prepare for a major strike. With the decline of Stout’s popularity after 1986, James Sutton had risen to the presidency of DC33. He and Cronin, of DC47, presented a united front as the negotiating deadline loomed. Rendell unilaterally imposed new work rules when the deadline passed, provoking a walkout. The following afternoon, workers learned on the 5 o’clock news that a Sutton–Rendell deal had been reached. DC47, lacking leverage outside of a partnership with DC33, announced a settlement as well.

Rendell achieved nearly all of his original demands, sending shockwaves through the municipal workforce. The contract granted meager raises and saved the sanitation department from elimination, but reimposed management control through city oversight over the health-and-welfare fund, the privatization of whole departments, the end of the no-layoffs clause in place since 1939, and new performance reviews and work rules. Sutton’s acceptance of this contract without a prolonged fight led to bitter divisions within the union as years of hard-fought gains were wiped out and hundreds lost their jobs while the rest returned to a workplace more vulnerable to management tyranny. Sutton’s surrender reflected his faith that AFSCME could win back its power under more favorable conditions. But favorable conditions would not emerge for another 30 years. In the meantime, Philadelphia’s AFSCME councils limped along.

Philadelphia was also a city that rose twice in response to police brutality in 2020, first after the murder of George Floyd in May, and then again in October. The uprisings in Philadelphia consciously sought to link the fight against police terror with fights against other social ills, and the coalition that came together in that time was notably multifaceted. Protests against homelessness and the inequities of the pandemic featured prominently in the movement milieu, with protest and survival encampments serving as key gathering points. Sanitation workers applied the principle that Black lives matter to their workplace, rallying against poor working conditions during those months of rage in spite of management threats.

When Philadelphia rose, its people were forcefully suppressed. The National Guard and the police occupied the city. West Philadelphia’s Black Main Street was tear-gassed without provocation in May. Encampments were disbanded between July and October, as the promise of housing was paired with the threat of force. The city rose again after police shot and killed Walter Wallace Jr., and the National Guard returned. With the city’s political establishment forced to concede reforms and unrest recurring as late as 2023, fatigue beset the Philadelphia Police Department. Facing lawsuits and increased scrutiny, and stuck with a popular progressive DA, the police department embarked on a soft strike that continues to this day, handling their daily duties with reluctance and risk aversion.

Cherelle Parker’s 2023 mayoral victory in a low-turnout election, won on a blue-collar conservative platform of law and order, services, and sanitation, was thought to be a gift to Philadelphia’s centrist elites. The city’s commentariat pigeonholed Philly’s Black and brown working class into a folksy Democratic loyalism, assuming that the progressive politics they saw as the provenance of transplants and yuppies could never take hold among the masses. Yet, the most disruptive blue-collar rebellion in the city in decades arose largely from the same demographic ranks that had elected Parker. Young, progressive workers would indeed participate in the strike, but we did not inspire or direct its action. We merely joined an effort that was years in the making.

In 2024, the newly minted DC33 president, Greg Boulware, came out of the gate with a militant posture, calling Parker’s proposed 2 to 3 percent raise and one-year contract extension unacceptable. He summoned the membership to a mass public rally outside city hall to assess our strike readiness while asserting the workers’ strength in numbers and public commitment. The 2024 public rally was extraordinary in how ordinary its participants were. Regular working-class people, families, and sanitation workers who hadn’t had time to change out of high-vis clothing assembled in the manner of a social movement. Union trucks distributed signs reading “NO MORE GIVE BACKS” and “LABOR IS THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE.” A strike vote was called as the rally concluded, and members overwhelmingly voted to authorize. DC33 entered into talks with Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 234, the train and bus operators of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, to synchronize their strikes. But when the TWU backed down ahead of their contract’s negotiating deadline and Parker offered DC33 a 5 percent raise ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, leadership decided it would be better to save our strength.

Workers found out on the Friday evening news that the council had approved a deal. In a frustrating instance of collusion between union, employer, and media, 6ABC televised a joint conference with Boulware and Parker extolling the deal without any mention of member ratification. Members ratified the deal in much smaller numbers than the strike authorization vote. This could have been the end of DC33’s renewed labor militancy. It’s hard to say what direction municipal labor would have taken if DC33 were offered three more 5 percent raises with no strings attached in a 2025 contract, but Parker instead demanded concessions and offered a 2 percent pittance, giving us no choice but to stand up and strike.

If stagnant wages were enough to bring workers to the brink of a strike in 2024, the harsh concessions the city demanded in 2025 were enough to guarantee one. City negotiators insisted on sole administratorship of the health and welfare fund – a key point of contention since the 1986 strike – as well as a reduced number of sick days without a doctor’s note before workers land on the “sick abuse” list, which punishes them with reduced leave.

The city demanded the right to change schedules to accommodate weekend and evening work as well as 10- and 12-hour days without payment of overtime. Performance reviews and discipline were reworked with language that would circumvent our Weingarten rights and limit grievance procedures. The city wanted the unilateral right to suspend workers considered a “threat to themselves, others, or city equipment,” as well as any worker charged with a crime, regardless of a future conviction. Workers’ ability to collect backpay and overtime owed to them would be curtailed. The city also demanded the right to reassign employees to any work location within the 142 square miles of the city limits, assign city work outside the bargaining unit, and employ unrepresented temporary and part-time employees without restriction.

Workers who took on the responsibility of canvassing our workplaces prior to the strike had it easy – all that was needed to secure a near universal commitment to action was to present the city’s own demands and poor wage offer to our coworkers, without much commentary. As Boulware again led members through the rehearsals of collective power practiced in 2024, it became clear that leadership was more serious this time. But after the surprise announcement of a deal the previous year, no one could fully trust that a strike would take place until it did. However valid the reasons in 2024, they were not communicated effectively to membership. Even stewards could not say with certainty whether a strike would happen; in 2024, preparatory meetings had been held just days before a strike was called off.

Likely believing that the false alarm in 2024 had proven municipal strikes were a thing of the past, management was totally unwilling to take the looming threat of disruption seriously. Emails and public acknowledgments of the strike only arrived two business days before the deadline. DC47’s quisling leadership was uninterested in joining its older sibling on the picket lines, believing they could secure a sweetheart deal by collaborating with the city. The city and its turncoat allies assumed that the stratified, professionalized nature of the modern municipal workplace would coerce even the most sympathetic professionals into keeping their heads down, but DC47 members were outraged when they discovered just how spineless and unprepared their leadership was. In departments with significant clerical workforces, DC33 and DC47 members work side by side. Many DC47 members felt just as compelled to strike as workers in DC33, but they did not have guidance from their union or management until the eve of the deadline.

At midnight on July 1, a strike was declared via text alert. The sole DC33 member on the clock at the city’s central Municipal Services Building (MSB) walked off the job and began picketing by himself. By dawn, members had deployed throughout the city, abandoning work vehicles and early morning job duties and assembling picket lines at as many work sites as possible. The widespread nature of the strike affected sanitation, water, medical, library, rec center, swimming pool, court, housing, street, police dispatch, airport, port authority, and coronary services, creating chaos for city administrators. As workers lined up along the sidewalks to solicit honks from traffic, it became clear that the city was behind us. Picket lines along arterial roads developed a cookout atmosphere as members and supporters came together to build what any observer of today’s social movements would identify as a series of encampments. The establishment of a citywide network of picket line encampments represented a synthesis of labor’s post-pandemic militancy with tactics for the contestation of public space that have been developed and refined in social movements from Occupy and Standing Rock to Columbia University.

The city’s initial paralysis would not last long. Public sector strikes are governed by Pennsylvania Act 195, which is more limited than federal labor law. Already on July 2, a judge ordered 911 dispatchers, medical examiners, and a skeleton crew of water department employees back to work. The injunction further prohibited picket lines of more than seven people, as well as most interactions between strikers and other workers, with everything from chanting and photographing to persuasion classified as harassment. This first salvo of the city’s response, creating restrictions on the methods and manner of picket lines and ordering workers back on the job, initially put us on the back foot. But as we would come to learn, injunctions are only as effective as their enforcement.

At most picket lines, workers gathered to discuss their responses to the injunctions. There was little appetite for full compliance. Subsequently, the strike became a game of cat and mouse. At many locations, strikers would assemble first thing in the morning. Supervisors would remotely order white-collar workers to report to their job sites and cross the picket line. Our reluctant rank-and-file siblings in DC47 would arrive but drag their feet. Many DC47 workers were able to lean on the language of safety to defer crossing the picket line until administrators showed up in person to force them to do so, all the while leaking communications from management to us. The mayor’s 2024 return-to-office mandate was unpopular with DC47 workers, and some of them now invoked it during the strike as a reason to refuse orders to work from home.

Sympathetic DC47 members complained about the heat, the rain, or the smell of trash and were told to go home. When they couldn’t avoid reporting to work, they’d be asked by their supervisors to document evidence that the picket lines were unsafe to cross. Striking workers would assume a boisterous posture to lend credibility to these claims, then prepare for the police to show up for an escort. When neighborhood police patrols were called, they’d be told that picketers were blocking the doors. When they showed up and found the doors unobstructed, they’d tip their hats and go back on patrol, at times unaware that the workers lined up on the other sidewalk weren’t on strike. Due to the diffuse nature of city workplaces, at some locations it took several days for the right arrangement of authorities to come together and wrap their heads around worker tactics of confusion and ambiguity.

This trickery was successful because throughout the entire eight-day affair, the moral economy of the strike remained heavily in favor of the union and the strikers. The city did not deploy effective countermessaging tactics to legitimize the suppression of the strike. People broadly understood that municipal workers are essential to the facilitation of urban living and considered the strike to be a commendable action. Teachers, Teamsters, grad workers affiliated with the United Auto Workers union, transit operators, and hotel and communications workers joined and supplied our picket lines. Most impactfully, people in positions with key strategic value understood our strike as legitimate. Restrictions on the size of pickets and the numerous technical violations of city code that could have been mobilized to deprive picket lines of their amenities were seldom enforced by police, allowing us to maintain encampments with more amenities than what has been possible in the more polarizing political movements of recent decades. Even after running out of excuses, many white-collar workers flatly refused to cross the picket line. Despite being explicitly barred from sympathy striking, many underpaid professionals realized that they could not be replaced as skilled workers in departments that have long been understaffed, and they used this leverage to take bold stands beyond their legal rights in support of the strike. Even when certain key personnel could be coerced into contributing to the strikebreaking effort, they almost always did the bare minimum. The prevailing attitude during the strike lent credence to the oft-heard elite anxiety of the past several years that “nobody wants to work anymore.”

At one library, after days of cat-and-mouse games, administrators and police finally assembled to arrange an escort. Knowing that the line could not hold without risking futile arrests but that their coworkers would have their backs from the inside, strikers lined up on either side of the entrance, transforming the escort into a show of worker power. Strikers and their DC47 allies agreed to a wildcat sick-out and sang a chant decrying the mayor’s greed, written by a sympathetic librarian. With management thinking that they had won, the game of cat and mouse began again the next day. None of the city’s libraries opened during the strike.

Similar scenes took place at the MSB in Center City, where the city concentrated some of its strongest efforts at breaking the strike. Due to the 24-hour nature of the pickets at the MSB and the large number of entrances that needed to be covered, strikers did not keep nonstriking workers out for long. However, the workers who were forced to go in knew that their contract’s fortunes were tied to the strikers’ and intuitively grasped that they would need to work to rule. The windows of the MSB were lined with messages of support, and one has to imagine that little clerical work got done with all the ruckus outside.

In synthesizing the innovations of this century’s social movements with the imperatives of the strike, workers sought to mobilize activist techniques to combat common ruling-class strikebreaking tactics. While waiting on better official channels through which to accept donations to the strike fund, rank-and-file library and clerical workers created a mutual aid network that could meet individual strikers’ needs directly. When contracted labor refused to scab, we added those workers to our mutual aid boards as well. The solidarity of rank-and-file professionals in mixed workplaces was remarkable, especially because the modern workplace is structured to prevent this kind of coordination. However, this collective action was largely absent where it was needed the most. In workplaces with few DC33 workers, departments with a manual labor divide, and in the most essential settings dominated by professionals, such as water treatment plants and city health clinics, it was much easier to coerce white-collar workers into action or inaction that helped break the strike.

With most city offices closed for the holiday, strikers and supporters gathered for a mass rally that followed the Independence Day parade from Old City to Parkway Central Library, in full view of the concert’s gates, where marchers from several other protest groups joined the picket line. The downtown rally was in full swing when the second act of the concert, Jazmine Sullivan, announced that she too would cancel her appearance. The sparsely attended concert ended abruptly at 9pm as fireworks were launched unceremoniously and without the scheduled remarks from Mayor Parker. This was the high point of the strike, and it seemed possible that the workers had achieved a high enough level of public support that the city would have to concede. But as Saturday morning came around, it became clear that Parker would not yield. The strike settled into a stalemate that would last another four days.

In one particularly interesting instance of contact between strikers and protesters, a rally and march in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner long championed on the left but hated by cops and blue-collar conservatives, was planned to intersect with the picket line outside a library on 52nd Street – the very same street that had been tear-gassed by police in 2020. Not wanting to invite police repression or media scrutiny, strike captains coordinated a brief meetup between the protest and the picket line but ultimately asked that protesters continue along their planned marching route. This was an underdeveloped opportunity for union–movement coordination, with organizers later realizing that the protest, in blocking an arterial road, had prevented scab trash haulers from taking waste out of the city from a nearby dumping site. Had this opportunity been seized at scale, it may have helped resolve a major weakness during the strike: the union’s difficulty in disrupting the city’s emergency measures.

At the outset of the strike, Parker designated a few dozen empty lots, sanitation centers, and other locations as emergency dumping sites and directed residents to take their trash to those locations so that scab trash collection could be centralized.² This was a fairly effective strategy for keeping the volume of trash from piling up to an unmanageable extent, though it created acute sanitation hazards in many working-class neighborhoods. Parker had to undermine her own constituency in order to organize dumping in a manner that could keep Center City clean for tourists and business interests.

Workers did what they could to throw sand in the gears. In at least one instance, sanitation workers defied the injunctions to close a city dump, despite police pressure. In other instances of autonomous sabotage, workers and strike sympathizers reportedly slashed the tires of more than a dozen city vehicles, opened a cluster of 25 fire hydrants in Parker’s neighborhood, raided a sanitation center to remove trash from a dumpster, vandalized the trucks of private haulers, and shut off the external water valve of a public works department facility that was open on an emergency basis. But in general, and especially toward the end of the strike, private haulers were able to load their trucks and move trash without issue.

From the perspective of a library worker, whose trade is a sort of information brokering, the impact of advances in the organization of information in the intervening decades is clear to see: The state’s power has expanded substantially since the days when sanitation workers skirmished with scabs and police in 1938. Then, the weapon of choice to repress a strike was still the truncheon. In 2025, it was the camera and the database. With the exception of brave, spontaneous actions of sabotage and the civil disobedience of rank-and-file DC47 allies, workers, sympathizers, and other actors in the strike largely had to play by ruling-class rules. The state has put a camera on every corner and a payroll number next to every worker’s name, among other technological and organizational changes that have expanded the information and power asymmetry between the classes. Though the means to resist new technologies of control are being developed in successive worker struggles, the fact remains that city administrators in 2025 were able to monitor the varied terrain of the strike instantaneously and project power across the airwaves by issuing directives and hounding workers via email and text and threatening retroactive discipline on the shared understanding that digital evidence of worker behavior during the strike would last forever. While militancy and solidarity were very visible during the strike and are worth highlighting, the efficacy of certain subtle aspects of the city’s response should not go understated. We’ll never know how many DC47 workers quietly took their laptops home and clocked in each day without ever seeing a picket line.

The courts handed Parker more leverage with another strikebreaking injunction, which ordered the sanitation department back to work. When threatened with the loss of this major leverage point, DC33 voted to put the city’s offer up for ratification. The terms were 3 percent raises across the board for three years and additional longevity raises for members at their fifth year, which would give an additional 2 percent raise to the veteran membership. In total, this means 14–16 percent raises during Parker’s mayoral term, depending on worker longevity and classification. An extra day was added to the threshold before uncertified sick-outs are penalized, giving workers six unconditional sick days per year. The city dropped its other major concession demands and offered a signing bonus that, when paired with strike funds, made up all of the wages we had lost on strike and then some. DC47’s scab leadership proudly announced that they’d be holding a strike authorization vote on July 10 . . . two days after it could’ve made a difference.

Workers returned to the job generally feeling a mix of pride and disappointment. The defensive gains secured by the strike were not insignificant, but the rank and file yearned for better wage gains. Many DC33 members have spent much of their lives in or on the edge of poverty; few if any live without the threat of financial hardship hanging over them. That our efforts had seemingly moved the needle so little on wages was demoralizing, especially given the union’s earlier demands of as much as 8 percent a year. As in most contract ratification cycles, workers got whiplash seeing their leaders accept a deal that they had previously condemned as unacceptable before and during the strike. These frustrations were compounded by difficulties in the timely disbursement of strike funds, which meant that although members made back all their wages lost on strike, many were not able to do so during the month in which the strike occurred – a financial hazard for workers living paycheck to paycheck.

Boulware did something unusual before the ratification vote: He initially refused to campaign for or against ratification and instead told members to vote their conscience. This left open the slim possibility that, following a strike authorization from DC47, DC33 would reject the city’s offer, bringing the full municipal workforce back into the streets. Thanks to DC47’s collaborationist leadership, this did not come to pass. They announced a tentative agreement on July 15, the day after their strike authorization vote ended. The results of their vote were never released. DC47’s deal had percent raises worse than our own and did nothing to address the mayor’s return-to-office mandate, a major issue for their members. Isolated again after holding out for a joint strike, Boulware sent a letter to members advocating for ratification. Even so, only 64 percent of DC33 members voted to ratify. Though the 2025 strike ended with disappointing contracts for both councils, workers gained experience and a sense of their own power that won’t soon be forgotten.

The 2025 strike nonetheless constituted an event that affected the whole of local society. Can it serve as a nucleus around which further labor coordination can be built? Recent attempts by DC33 leadership to connect with other sections of the labor movement and a growing cross-union rank-and-file solidarity make a strategy of broad, coordinated labor actions tangible and worthy of consideration. On the picket line, where municipal worker struggles found common cause with social movements that stoked and channeled the city’s disillusionment into action, it was possible to see a faint reverberation of the general strikes from Philadelphia’s militant past. But in order for labor to exercise this kind of power in society again, workers in this century will need to overcome the legal and bureaucratic constraints imposed against cross-sector strikes, and the refinement of coercive methods in an age where police batons – the traditional strikebreaking weapons – are now paired with scientific management, street cameras, and digital forensics.

Despite the long road we walk, readers should take solace in the fact that we in Philadelphia are building up our strength for the struggles ahead. At an eleventh-hour strike-captains’ meeting in late June 2025, President Boulware asked the crowd of around 200, “How many of you have been on strike before?” Only a few hands shuffled in the silent room. DC33’s contract expires in July 2028, the year in which the United Auto Workers and other big unions have begun to plan for coordinated action across the labor movement. If municipal workers stay the course, then when the question “How many of you have been on strike before?” is asked again, it will be met with many hands, ready to get to work.