An Organizer at Heart
Trailblazer Lillian Roberts has sacrificed a great deal to give workers dignity — even her freedom.
NEW YORK CITY
It was Christmas Eve 1968.
It was cold. But AFSCME organizer Lillian Roberts didn’t mind the temperature as she stood with her sons on the steps of New York City’s 98-year-old Civil Jail. She was happy to be free in time for Christmas. Even better, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R) would have to obey the law and allow state workers to choose their own union. Victory!
It had been a quite a journey since the day more than 20 years before when, as a newly elected steward, Roberts had taken her first grievance — on understaffing — to her supervisor at the University of Chicago Hospital.
"When I went in, she started hollering and screaming. I guess she thought she was going to scare me," Roberts recalls. It didn’t work. The supervisor ordered her out of the office.
"You have five days to respond. That’s exactly what the book says," said Roberts, handing her a copy of the union contract as she left the office. "You should read it. It was made by both the university and the union."
Five days later, the supervisor gave in and hired ten new staff members. "It was amazing. That was just the hammer I needed to know where I belonged," says Roberts.
Soon Roberts was tapped by Illinois AFSCME to help in organizing drives.
"I would show up in the locker room as if I was a worker. And I’d start talking to the workers about having a union," she says. "I could organize them quick, and I had their phone numbers. I’d get them strong enough to come to a meeting, and then we would start."
It was a difficult job — and dangerous for those who supported the union — because Illinois had no laws giving workers the right to organize. But Roberts used every trick in the book.
"My work expanded to the point where I had about five or six mental hospitals around the state," she says. She learned all the state’s rules and regulations and brought in a lawyer to help injured workers file workers compensation claims.
Roberts always drew strength from the members. They knew and respected her. And, at AFSCME’s 1964 International Convention, the Illinois delegation elected her AFSCME’s first African-American woman International vice president. Soon after she was faced with a difficult choice.
A major hospital organizing drive was underway in New York City, and Roberts was asked to come East. The move meant she would have to step down as AFSCME vice president.
But Roberts was an organizer at heart, and the plight of the city’s hospital workers touched her. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the campaign.
As part of her organizing strategy, Roberts offered the New York City hospital workers what she and fellow Chicago hospital workers had dreamed of: "a second chance" to improve their lives.
"I’d tell workers, ‘Don’t worry about your education. We’ll have a high school equivalency program to prepare you to become a licensed practical nurse. From that to a nurse; from that to a physician’s assistant — on up.’
"In every single hospital we drew the program out for the workers, and I’ll tell you, they were so excited," she says. "When I finished with them, we won the election by, I think, 100 votes. I played to my strength. I had calculated it down to about 100 votes, and we brought them out, all night."
Roberts kept her pledge and found sources of funding for the educational program. "And I have all kinds of pictures showing the first graduation," she remembers. "I just had to stand and cry." The education program remains a jewel in DC 37’s crown.
Her next assignment, organizing New York state’s mental hospitals, landed her in the city’s dank, grungy jailhouse.
Roberts had done a good job bringing the workers together — too good for Rockefeller. The governor had promised to hold a representation election and allow AFSCME to compete for the workers’ votes. But rather than fulfill his pledge — and follow the state’s labor laws — the governor entered into negotiations with another union.
AFSCME had no choice but to call a strike. It lasted 11 days.
As strike leader, Roberts received a 30-day sentence — the longest ever imposed under New York’s Taylor law. Sitting in her unheated, miserable cell, she longed for her children and feared that they would not have Christmas together.
But as she left the jail on Christmas Eve — due to public outcry — those worries fell away. She was free to celebrate the holiday — and her organizing victory.
Roberts went on to serve as associate director of DC 37 and, later, she served for six years as secretary of labor for New York state. Now retired, Roberts, 69, has passed the union torch to her son Ivan Smith, a labor lawyer. She does not regret the sacrifices she made in her many years with AFSCME. "If anybody has had a full life," she says, "I think I have." Roberts remains committed to the future of labor.
She said it all the day she was imprisoned: "As long as there are public employees who do not make adequate salaries and do not have the right to vote, there will be people like me who do not mind spending 30 days in jail."
By Susan Ellen Holleran
