Influential labor leader Ryan Boyer says he is trying to mend a bitter divide with the city’s teachers union over its support for charter schools and private school vouchers, although the union disputes his description of the alleged outreach efforts.
Boyer heads and served as the head of the Construction Industry Council key supporter Mayor Cherelle Parker’s successful 2023 campaign. Last Thursday at the Center City Business Association luncheon, he discussed a wide range of topics, including his career, his vision for the education system and his hopes for a recent power plant in South Philadelphia.
During a question-and-answer session, Boyer said he plans to meet with the president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to discuss his concerns about the needy performance of public schools.
“I’ll be very honest, they’re not big fans of me,” he said. “You know, I’ll meet with [president] Arthur Steinberg at the School Teachers’ Association next week. I am a unionist, but if your product is not good, I will not support you. Now, your neighborhood product, you wouldn’t send your child there. So why do you want me to send mine?”
Boyer then explained that he planned to meet with the union to discuss his support for school choice, a term that typically covers charter schools and public funding of private education.
In most charter schools, teachers do not belong to unions. Moreover, this is what the Republican demands state fund vouchers for families pay tuition at a private school they staunchly oppose teachers unions and most Democratic lawmakers, and have played a role in the current budget impasse.
“I was a public figure [about supporting] school choice and they don’t like school choice, and I could be persuaded not to support school choice if district-run schools make some innovations and changes on their own,” Boyer told Billy Penn. “I actually prefer it more because philosophically I’m not a supporter of school choice, but I understand how desperate some people are to give their child an education.”
However, PFT spokeswoman Jane Roh said no such meeting with the union leader was scheduled.
“President Steinberg has repeatedly invited Mr. Boyer to discuss their differences privately,” she wrote in an email. “While President Steinberg is disappointed that Mr. Boyer has so far declined to be reached by the PFT, he remains open to the possibility of initiating a dialogue directly with Mr. Boyer (rather than through the press acting as a business association).”
She also sent a link to social media post she did in May. It shows a photo of public school supporter Lisa Haver standing next to Boyer at a meeting and holding a sign that reads: “Charter schools are non-union shops.” “Cheers,” Roh wrote in the post and tagged Haver.
Union versus union
Quincy Harris, a public relations consultant, interviewed Boyer about his life and career, including his rise to leadership positions with the Workers’ Union Local 332 and the Workers’ District Council. He discussed his support for pro-business policies and economic growth in the city, as well as his efforts to create career paths for youthful people and improve educational opportunities.
He has repeatedly criticized public schools, saying they need to be modernized and reoriented to provide education for jobs in construction and trades, where he believes there are not enough skilled workers to meet demand.
“My phone in 2025 looks completely different than it did in 1989 when I graduated from high school, but the classroom looks the same. It shouldn’t be like that,” he said in response to Harris’ question. “America is moving forward. The world is moving forward. We must educate differently.”
“We can’t sit [our children] in the room and say, OK, let’s give school districts more funding. Yes, they need funds. They need funding, no doubt, but they also need a different curriculum for that day and time,” he added.
Boyer praised his mother for fighting to get him into a Philadelphia public special education school rather than a neighborhood school, and noted that he sent his own children to schools outside the city. He recently lobbied for the establishment Early College Charter School, which will be the city’s first recent facility in nearly a decade when it opens next year.
His stance led him to ally with conservative critics of conventional public education and illustrated long-standing divisions in the broader labor movement between private and public sector unions.
For example, in 2023, a political action committee funded by the Workers’ District Council donated $25,000 to another PAC called the Coalition for Security and Equal Growth, When asked, he reported.
The PAC was funded primarily by conservative megadonor and charter school supporter Jeffrey Yass, a leading bogeyman for the PFT and other teachers unions. It paid for ads opposing the campaigns of two progressive City Council candidates, Councilor Kendra Brooks and the Rev. Nicolas O’Rourke of the Working Families Party, and mayoral candidate Helen Gym, who was heavily backed by teachers unions. (Brooks was subsequently re-elected and O’Rourke also won his race.)
Boyer’s union members also reportedly crossed the picket line, a major taboo among unions. During the July strike by sanitation workers and other city workers of AFSCME District Council 33, some members of the Workers’ Union were doing preparatory work for the city’s annual Wawa Welcome America concert, according to the Inquirer.
Steinberg said at the time that scabbing – crossing picket lines – “is deplorable, treasonous conduct and cannot be tolerated for a second by organized labor.”
Advertising gas as a ‘bridge fuel’
Boyer touched on a number of other topics, including growing regional demand for electricity and hopes for a recent gas-fired plant in the Bellwether neighborhood, an industrial campus being built on the site of a former oil refinery in South Philadelphia.
“Bellwether County is a great place where we could put in some combined heat and power plants,” he said, referring to facilities that produce both electricity and heat. “Together with PECO and PGW, we have an incredible opportunity to make sure we build energy resiliency in the Bellwether District and maybe some areas of the Navy Yard.”
“These are things I talk to the CEO about [Bellwether developer HRP Group]president of PGW and president of PECO. These are the conversations we’re having… We all want to transition to renewables, but to get there we need a bridge fuel. “We believe that natural gas can be the cleanest and safest alternative or bridge fuel before we move to wind, solar and renewable energy,” he said.
HRP Group and PGW declined to comment on the prospect of building a power plant at the site or confirm that Boyer had spoken to their CEOs. PECO directed questions to HRP Group.
“While we are aware of public discussions about a potential cogeneration facility in the Bellwether District, we cannot comment on the plans of other involved parties,” said PECO spokeswoman Candice Womer.
“We are committed to supporting solutions that help meet our region’s evolving energy needs, especially those that would increase energy supply in the face of exponential growth in demand,” she said. “We are working with stakeholders on approaches that will enable more generation to be added to the grid to further ensure reliability and help address rising energy supply costs for customers.”
Any plan to build a power plant would probably be plausible met with fierce opposition from environmentalists and others who point out that the operate of natural gas is a major contributor to climate change. Nearby residents may also be fighting back, saying they have suffered damage from decades of air pollution from the senior refinery and have expressed concerns about the facility’s ongoing impact on the environment.
The Bellwether district currently consists of two unoccupied warehouse-type buildings that could be used by logistics companies or e-commerce companies such as Amazon, and HRP Group said the site would also be suitable for frigid storage, large-scale manufacturing and other non-residential uses.
California canned beverage maker DrinkPak is considering building a 1.3 million-square-foot facility in Bellwether, Philadelphia Business Journal reported last week. The company, which works with companies that produce energy drinks, sodas, waters, challenging seltzers and canned cocktails, said it plans to open a recent facility in the region in early 2027.
