(Sean Kitchen / The Keystone)

Direct action always gets the goods. Am I right? 

Workers at the Sheraton Downtown Philadelphia hotel, which is Philadelphia’s largest unionized hotel, successfully wrapped up a nine-day strike during the FIFA World Cup in order to secure a $30 per hour minimum wage for housekeepers and other non-tipped positions. 

Hundreds of members with UNITE HERE Local 274 walked off the job earlier this month after working more than two years without a contract. According to the tentative agreement, workers successfully negotiated lowering their daily room quota to 15 rooms for room attendants, an 18% gratuity added to banquets, and increases to pensions and family healthcare coverage. 

On top of that, the union was successful in leveraging the World Cup, America 250, and other high-profile tourist attractions to set a new citywide standard of $30 per hour at other unionized hotels around the city.

“When we said we were fighting for $30 an hour at the beginning of this campaign, a lot of people told us we were asking for the impossible,” said Shafeek Anderson, a steward at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Hotel. “With this victory, we have shown the whole industry that nothing is impossible when workers stick together.” 

(Sean Kitchen / The Keystone)

Today marks 20 years since the last time the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a bill raising the minimum wage, and Democrats in the Pennsylvania House and Senate decided to take a trip down memory lane to what life was like 20 years ago during the age of Limewire and Myspace. 

In order to push Senate Republicans to vote on a bill raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2029, Democrats successfully filed a discharge petition to bring the issue to a vote, but Republican leadership let the bill fall to the wayside.

“In 2006, Twitter was created. In 2006, I graduated law school. In 2006. Gas was $2.50. In 2006, you could get a gallon of milk for $2. In 2006, you could get diapers for $3. In 2006, I still ate cereal and it was two for $4,” Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia), said at a press conference in the capitol on Tuesday. 

She added, “But in 2026, every price has gone up. We know gas is $5. We know milk is $5 for a gallon. We know one box of cereal, if you got a coupon, is $5. It’s no way that workers in New Jersey and in New York and in West Virginia and in Ohio and in Maryland and in Delaware all have a higher minimum wage than the workers right here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

(Sean Kitchen / The Keystone)

What budget? 

By the looks of things, and I mean the complete emptiness of the Pennsylvania Capitol this week, it appears that the Pennsylvania budget will once again be late. 

The Pennsylvania Capitol has been eerily quiet at a time when lawmakers should be hashing out the final details of this year’s budget, but some in Democratic leadership are hopeful that a potential budget stalemate won’t last as long as this past year’s, which ended in November.

House Democrats passed Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget in April, but Senate Republicans have yet to offer up a plan. Instead, they decided to skip town and get an early start on the holiday. 

“People are being squeezed from every direction. The costs of housing, utilities and groceries are rising, federal cuts have already stripped hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians of their health coverage and food assistance, and Harrisburg has yet to pass a budget that meets this moment,” Arielle Klagsbrun, Pennsylvania campaign director at the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), said in a statement.