Rising from nurse’s aide to leader of NYC’s municipal workers, Lillian Roberts exemplified the promise of public employee unionism — upward mobility and a seat at the table for workers too often “on the menu” when bigshots cut jobs, paychecks, and benefits.
Roberts died last week at 98, after a storied career organizing hospital workers, leading the state Labor Department, and heading the huge city employees union, District Council 37.
Often the first Black woman in powerful positions, no one identified more closely with powerless low-wage workers. As the historian Jewel Bellush wrote, when Roberts organized municipal hospital workers in the 1960s, she understood “the personal plight…of women working in settings that included hot, crowded kitchens, unpleasant laundries, and large dehumanized hospital wards.” Through the union, these workers won wage increases as well as education, career ladder, health and safety, and leadership training programs.
These victories made history, as did the early leaders of public service, education, and healthcare unions: Victor Gotbaum of DC 37, Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers, and Leon Davis of Local 1199 (private hospital workers). Gotbaum and Shanker saved the city during the 1975 fiscal crisis. The unions bought municipal bonds and agreed to layoffs and “give-backs” in pay and benefits, averting the city’s default and preserving collective bargaining.
This wasn’t the legacy the founding generation wanted. My first speechwriting job was with Jerry Wurf — the national president of the public employee union AFSCME and founder of DC 37. Together with Gotbaum and Roberts, Wurf was an ally of the socialist leader Michael Harrington.
As the historian Joshua Freeman wrote, a more diverse “successor generation,” including Roberts at DC 37 and Sandra Feldman at UFT, mostly recovered the gains that workers made in the 1960s. But public and private-sector unions have struggled to stay even in a globalized, financialized, deindustrialized, de-unionized, and gentrified New York.
What then of the rising generation of union activists? For today’s firebrands, labor’s past offers lessons. In New York’s last era of mass unionization — the 1950s and ’60s — thousands of city employees, public school teachers, and hospital workers organized. Often Black and/or female — and with growing numbers of Latinos — these workers were excluded from federal labor legislation, along with farm workers and domestic employees.
Public service unions built alliances with the civil rights and women’s movements, as well as liberal politicians. Two very different mayors, Robert F. Wagner Jr. (whose father wrote the National Labor Relations Act) and John V. Lindsay (an ally of civil rights activists who offended the outer-borough middle class) promoted emerging unions.
Back then, public employees traded job security for subpar salaries. Today, real wages have stagnated. Private sector unions, such as garment workers, have dwindled. And public employees have been scapegoated for supposedly enjoying job security long gone in private industry.
Tomorrow’s leaders would do well to organize private sector and precarious workers, as well as the growing sector of privately funded public service providers, while strengthening alliances with those who depend most on public services. As with Wagner and Lindsay, Zohran Mamdani may offer the push from a pro-labor mayor.
Public service unions’ founders were streetfighters before they became statesmen and stateswomen. It’s time to bring back that spirit before the labor movement becomes a museum piece.
Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992-1994. A former staffer for AFSCME, he is the author of “Love the Work, Hate the Job” and “Speaking American” and co-author with the late AFL-CIO President John Sweeney of “America Needs a Raise.”