Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross, Period!

Victory to the Philly DC 33 City Workers Strike!

Striking sanitation workers on Day One of the DC 33 walkout. (Photo: Alejandro A Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer)

On July 1, 9,000 Philadelphia city workers in AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) District Council 33 went on strike – its first since 1986. The union’s demands are for an 8% annual raise in pay over three years, although DC 33 leaders are now saying they would settle for 5% a year. That would be no raise at all, since inflation in Philadelphia has averaged 4.94% from 2020 through 2025, and is only going up. The union demands also include full coverage of health insurance. The wage “offer” by Democratic Philly mayor Cherelle Parker of 8.7% over three years (or 2.9% a year!) is an insult to the workers who toiled straight through the COVID pandemic at risk to their lives, particularly the key sanitation workers who are the backbone of the strike. The Internationalist Group says: Victory to the DC 33 Strike! All city labor should join with them in this historic struggle.

And we add: Picket lines mean don’t cross, period! In the first days of the strike, we have seen a lot of support from working people and passing motorists, particularly at the key 5100 Grays Avenue sanitation facility in West Philadelphia, where many people have been dropping off food and supplies for the strikers. The headline performer for the Fourth of July concert, rapper LL Cool J, declared he would not perform, out of solidarity with the strike: “there's absolutely no way that I could perform, cross a picket line and pick up money when I know that people are out there fighting for a living wage.” A day later R&B artist Jazmine Sullivan announced she also would not perform. Good for them!

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Yet lamentably, although the contract of AFSCME Local 2187 (part of DC 47), representing largely white-collar Philly municipal employees, also expired on July 1, it is working under a two-week contract extension, negotiated in order not to walk out together with DC 33. Worse yet, DC 47 leaders have instructed members to scab on the DC 33 strike. A Local 2187 strike advisory on Instagram says: “If you are given an order to perform the work of a DC 33 member, you should comply with that order.” To hell with that! All class-conscious workers must refuse to cross DC 33 picket lines for any reason whatsoever! And in fact, as we saw at a library in West Philadelphia on Saturday, when DC 47 employees showed up as instructed at their workplaces, they promptly joined the DC 33 picket lines.

A strike authorization vote for DC 47 has been scheduled for July 10. The only reason it is being held at all is because the rank and file demanded it. There is no reason to wait. All municipal employees should walk out now and join their DC 33 sisters and brothers in a powerful, all-out city workers strike. And the rest of Philadelphia labor should join them, along with other strike supporters, on thousands-strong picket lines.

The strike battle lays bare the role of the Democratic Party, which is a bosses’ party even as some Democratic politicians sometimes pose as (phony) “friends of labor.” Mayor Parker is in tight with real estate developers who are behind her piddling plan to build 30,000 “affordable homes,” which is a drop in the bucket and does nothing for the half of city population who live in rental units. Parker is Philadelphia’s Eric Adams: she was elected in 2023 as a “tough-on-crime” candidate, and then brought back the racial-profiling stop-and-frisk “Terry stops” after she took office. A year ago she ordered sanitation workers to turn water hoses and leafblowers on a homeless encampment in Kensington. City workers should flatly refuse to carry out such vile attacks on poor people.

Internationalists on DC 33 picket lines, July 5. (Internationalist photo)

The strike also underscores the role of the police as professional strikebreakers, “the armed fist of capital.” During a strike rally on July 3 at Eakins Oval where the Wawa “Welcome America” Fourth of July event stage was being set up, the cops were out in force, shoving the crowd out of the way to let scabs pass. Large numbers of vans and school busses were waiting to haul off arrested strike supporters. And on June 10, some 15 people were arrested as police pushed demonstrators into the pavement as they protested arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) cops. The police are enemies of the working class, and that includes prison guards who are members of DC 33. We say: Cops out of the labor movement! For workers action to stop I.C.E. raids and deportations!

This is the same Philadelphia Police Department that 40 years ago, on Mother’s Day 1985, bombed the black MOVE commune on Osage Avenue, murdering eleven MOVE members, including five children. Seven years earlier, the PPD stormed MOVE headquarters in Powelton Village, West Philadelphia, jailing nine members, who spent four decades in prison on bogus murder charges over a cop who died in the massive assault. And the same PPD framed former Black Panther and renowned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1981 for a murder he did not commit. While the 1978 raid was carried out by racist Republican mayor (and former police chief) Frank Rizzo, the 1985 bombing was ordered by black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, and Democratic politicians have kept Mumia behind bars for 44 years, including three decades on death row. For workers action to free Mumia!

From 1985 to 2025, and long before, the Democratic Party has served to keep exploited working people and the oppressed black and immigrant population bound to their exploiters and oppressors. Today, the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) is seeking to put a left face on the capitalist party they represent, notably with the victory of DSAer Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral primary election last month. But whether under “progressives” like Mamdani or hard-liners like Parker, Democratic mayors are all the bosses of the racist killer cops!

Philadelphia’s striking sanitation workers and other city workers in DC 33 – and DC 47 – deserve every penny they can wrench from the penny-pinching city rulers. Their original demand for a 24% raise would be at best a modest improvement, the union leaders’ 15% proposal would be at best a wash, anything less a clear defeat. To enable militant strikers to hold out, it is essential that the rest of Philly’s labor movement come to their aid. Build picket lines so large and militant that no one dares cross! Surround City Hall and jam Center City so that nothing moves! The one-year contract of Transport Workers Union Local 234 is up in November: to win big then, the TWU should shut down SEPTA buses and trains NOW in support of the DC 33 strike!

Working people in the U.S. are under assault. The Trump administration is waging war on millions of immigrants – notably on immigrant workers, without whose labor this country could not run. His “One Big Ugly Bill” threatens to throw millions of poor people off Medicaid, while his bigoted attack on transgender youth threatens the rights of all. What is urgently needed is to mobilize hard-hitting class struggle to defeat the capitalist offensive against working people at home, and the imperialist war drive from Ukraine and Gaza to Iran. Beyond the militant tactics needed to win this strike, class-conscious workers must draw the political lessons of this battle and break the chains that bind them to the bosses’ Democratic Party, undertaking the struggle to build a workers party to fight for a workers government! Now that’s a real program for victory. ■