‘Digging in’: Union leaders strike defiant tone at Labor Day festival in South Philly

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

The speeches at the annual Labor Day celebration in South Philadelphia on Monday had a noticeably different tone than in the past few years.

The parade and festival hosted by the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO were as lively as ever, with thousands of unionized workers from around the region marching in matching T-shirts along Washington Avenue, accompanied by ear-splitting drumlines and a host of local elected officials.

But two years after Joe Biden became the first sitting president to attend the event, and spoke about “celebrating jobs” — a moment when one local union leader declared it was a “boom time” for organizing — speakers this year struck a loudly defiant note against a less-friendly administration in Washington and a changed environment for union workers.

“We must recommit ourselves to digging in and fighting like we never fought before,” said Brian Renfroe, national president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, who came from Washington, D.C., for the parade. “We have to fight like hell because we have faced unprecedented attacks on working people in a very short period of time.”

He led the group in a call and response, attacking President Donald Trump’s administration for eliminating hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and seeking to reduce workers’ bargaining rights.

“When they come after the jobs of public servants, the people who care for our veterans, administer Social Security, inspect our food, deliver our mail, what do we say?” Renfroe asked.

“Hell, no!” the crowd responded.

‘We’re going to fight for our rights’

Since he took office in February, Trump often has proclaimed that he is “putting the American worker first.” At the same time, he has acted to shrink the number of unionized workers in the U.S., stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Last Thursday, he issued an order that would expand that effort to the Patent and Trademark Office, NASA, the National Weather Service and other agencies.

Trump also has attempted to undo Labor Department rules benefiting home care workers and farmworkers, and he fired a board member at the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without the quorum needed to hear cases and rule on worker complaints of employer rule-breaking.

The parade Monday morning seemed to draw more participants than it did last year, said Samantha Zenobi, a steward with United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 152 who works at a ShopRite in Galloway, New Jersey.

Workers are concerned about “what’s going on in the world” and “want to show that we are not going to stand anything anymore. We’re going to fight for our rights,” she said.

Zenobi said she felt for postal workers and others who fear for their jobs under Trump. The president has discussed privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, and she said she was concerned that federal job cuts will increase unemployment generally and hurt the economy.

Closer to home, unionized workers are also worried about pay rates that lag despite high profits at their employers, she said.

“They’re billion-dollar companies, and they could be giving us more, especially with the work that we do, and they just give us pizza parties or other things. It doesn’t feel like they’re rewarding the good people that work hard, and just toss them aside, which is not fair,” Zenobi said.

Mixing celebration and calls for action

As usual, many local elected officials attended the rally in front of the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 19 union hall on Columbus Boulevard in South Philadelphia or marched in the subsequent parade on Washington Avenue.

Mayor Cherelle Parker and Building Trades Council leader Ryan Boyer sat down for a joint interview with a labor-focused radio program before the speeches began. Daniel Bauder, Philadelphia AFL-CIO president, noted the presence of Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, as well as several Philadelphia City Council members and Pennsylvania state senators and representatives.

Asked about the mixed mood among union members, Republican state Sen. Joe Picozzi, of North Philadelphia, said that in the long term “things look good” for unions, and he defended his party’s relationship with labor in Pennsylvania.

“What people are going to see is, my party is beginning to change. We’ve got a lot of very pro-labor Republicans in the Senate, and I serve on the Labor and Industry Committee,” Picozzi said, as he marched with a group of union members. “People forget just how much struggle and how much pain there was to get to this point where you have so many rights, and we’ve got to keep fighting for it.”

Parker and the other politicians did not speak to the crowd this year, yielding the stage to Renfroe and other state and national union officials, who both celebrated their historical achievements and called for solidarity and action in the face of new headwinds.

Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, said she was happy to honor the struggles of working people and celebrate the movement’s wins, but “somber” that U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer was planning to attend Monday’s Labor Day parade in Erie.

“Do they think that they can trick us? Show up for a parade, and somehow we’re going to think that they’re fighting for working people?” she said. “We see what they’re doing. You can’t pull the wool over our eyes.”

Local organizers in Erie planned to protest the parade there, as part of a set of “Workers Over Billionaires” protests being held Monday by members of the 50501 Movement in all 50 states. 50501’s goals are to “uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach,” according to its website, and it was part of the coalition that put on the “No Kings” rallies earlier this summer.

Union membership slips

Monday’s celebrations came at a moment of relative calm for the city’s unions, following some upheavals over the past year.

District Council 33, the city’s blue-collar union, held an eight-day strike in July that resulted in trash piling up in the streets but not in the gains the union had hoped for after Parker held out against their demands. She inked a new contract with DC 47, the white-collar union, and with the police officers union two weeks ago.

The city’s teachers union also approved a new contract agreement with the school district last month, avoiding a threatened strike that would have begun shortly after the start of the new school year.

While Philadelphia remains a bastion of unionism nationally, at the state level private-sector union membership has slightly declined lately, according to a new report from Keystone Research Center, a pro-labor think tank based in Harrisburg.

A wave of organizing activity at Starbucks, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, a Whole Foods store in Center City — the first in the U.S. to organize — and other companies had lifted union representation at private companies in the state to 8.7% in 2023, the report said. The figure then slipped back to 7.3% last year.

Job growth in Pennsylvania remains relatively strong, increasing to 0.7% in the first half of 2025, but would be even better if not for the loss of 2,600 federal jobs over that period, per the report.

“While recent years have brought job growth and record-low unemployment, the ground is shifting beneath workers’ feet,” Keystone wrote. “Workers face an unpredictable labor market, unemployment is rising, and wages — after decades of stagnation — are slipping again. Erratic federal policies make it harder for families to get by.”