Historical/Biographical Note
AFSCME Local 420, Hospital Workers, represents a wide range of non-professional workers employed in the New York City municipal hospitals and health centers. Until the 1950s city hospital workers, many of them black or Hispanic, were among the lowest paid of municipal workers and remained outside the organized labor movement. Registered and practical nurses, aides, orderlies, clerical assistants, laundry workers, maintenance workers and truck drivers often worked in unsanitary even dangerous conditions, under intense pressure. Their concerns, when hospital organizing began, were not only with pay, benefits and opportunities for advancement, but also with issues of respect and dignity on the job. The city hospital system, consisting of 21 hospitals spread throughout the five boroughs, each of them a vast complex of wards, clinics and offices, offered daunting obstacles to union organizing. In 1955 the fledgling Local 420, recently consolidated from several older units comprising AFSCME, District Council 37's Joint Board of Hospital Workers, had fewer than 500 members citywide.
AFSCME District Council 37 director Jerry Wurf assigned several dynamic organizers to the Local, with a view to increasing its size and challenging Teamsters Local 237, which was then the most influential union in the city hospital system. One of the key organizers in the early years was James Butler. Despite determined opposition from administrators, the Local grew steadily and some basic improvements in working conditions were achieved. By 1964, the Local had grown to nearly 5,000 members, while the Teamsters claimed 6,500. New DC 37 head Victor Gotbaum stepped up the drive among hospital workers, and assigned his trusted assistant Lillian Roberts, to the campaign. Roberts promised on-the-job training programs to move workers into better-paying jobs, decent treatment from, supervisors, fair grievance procedures and tough and honest collective bargaining. Gotbaum, meanwhile, enlisted the support of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, George Meany, the New York City Central Labor Council and a number of AFL-CIO union presidents on Local 420's behalf. By the fall of 1965 Gotbaum was ready to take on the Teamsters in a representation election, and in December 1965 city hospital workers, voting in the largest representation election in New York history, chose Local 420 as their union. The following year the Local negotiated an historic agreement with the City, providing for pay increases, welfare fund contributions by the City, and a dues check-off. The election gave DC 37 a majority in the hospitals and also among non-uniformed city workers; this success spawned new gains in organizing, and by the end of 1966 the Council represented more than 80,000 city employees. Over the next few years the Local continued to make steady gains through bargaining, but had continuing concerns over waste, inefficiency in management, understaffing and deplorable conditions at municipal hospitals, while city officials made more and more concessions to private hospitals. Steady pressure from DC37 blocked plans by the Lindsay administration to lease or fully privatize several hospitals. But this was only the first salvo in what was to become a continuing struggle to defend public hospitals and their unionized employees.
In 1972 James Butler was elected president of Local 420, and immediately took on the battle for better pay, benefits and educational opportunities, and against privatization and hospital closings. Butler led the Local through the trying times of citywide fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s and on to a period of greatly increased membership (reaching an estimated total of 14,000 in the early 1990s) and influence. He raised the public profile of the Local through rallies, marches, involvement in community affairs and a firm commitment to national, and even international, campaigns for civil rights and human rights. Butler's militant political agenda was furthered by Local officers such as Secretary-Treasurer (from 1984) Kendreth Smith, Executive Vice-President (from 1996) Sarah Kennedy, Vice-President Alejandro Ruiz, Political Action Chairman, and James Webb, among others.
Under Butler's administration the Local developed an effective newspaper, the City Hospital Worker; supported an award-winning choir, the Voices of Local 420; and participated in the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the New York State Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Labor Committee and other labor and civil rights organizations. The Local became a leading force in ASCME DC37's Hospitals Division and in AFSCME's Health Advisory Committee.
As a result of the staunch opposition of Local 420 and DC37, the Giuliani administration was prevented from selling off Coney Island, Elmhurst and Queens hospitals, as a first step toward dismantling the city hospital system. Despite the reluctance of other New York labor leaders to confront a popular mayor, President Butler organized rallies, prayer vigils outside homes of city officials, and a "Freedom Bus," that followed the mayor on the senate campaign trail. A landmark court decision blocked the sale of entire facilities, but Giuliani pushed ahead with drastic cutbacks in funding of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, reallocation of Medicaid funds to private hospitals, closures, and privatization of some hospital services, with the result that the Local's membership dropped to 7,500 and the number of municipal hospitals to 11 by 2001. Clashes between Butler and DC37 executive director Stanley Hill meant that the local could no longer count on firm Council backing in negotiations. In the late 1990s dissent began to grow within the Local, as members questioned lavish expenditures by the leadership, a burdensome dues increase, and plans for a lavish new local headquarters that never materialized.
In December local vice-president Carmen Charles, representing the opposition within the Local, challenged James Butler for the presidency and won, by a narrow margin. Despite repeated challenges to the election result by the Butler slate and inaction by DC 37, Charles's victory was finally confirmed by AFSCME's national Judicial Panel in May 2002. The new administration has embarked on a program of revitalization and reorganization, aimed at defending the some of the city's most vulnerable municipal workers in the chilly climate of the new millennium.
Sources:
Bernard and Jewel Bellush, Union Power and New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984).
Deirdre McFadden, "Butler's Last Stand," City Limits Monthly (on-line), November 2001.
Silver Anniversary Celebration of Jim Butler, October 11, 1997 (New York: AFSCME, Local 420, 1997).
Return to topScope and Content Note
Although the Collection contains images from Local 420's parent union, AFSCME-District Council 37, and District Council 37's own parent organization, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as well as a considerable number of images from other organizations, most of the Collection consists of images pertaining to Local 420 itself. The largest number of Collection's the images are black and white prints, followed by color prints, and most images date from the 1990s or are undated. The undated portion of the Collection appears to be largely from the 1980s; it also contains the earliest images in the Collection, a small amount that appears to be from the 1970s; some of the latter document events in the Local's history from the time just before and not long after James Butler was elected president of Local 420 (folder numbers 27, 106, 252, 757, and 758). The large number of photographs (in the Local Officers sub-subseries) of James Butler (and others from the upper levels of the Local's hierarchy) at political and social gatherings and being honored in ceremonies and with awards both inside and outside the union, capture Butler's rise from organizer to influential union president. Of special importance, then, are the images from the Units--the smallest organizational subdivisions of the Local-because they document individuals and activities of the rank and file membership in individual hospitals. The broad concerns of the Local and its parent organizations about national and international as well as New York City labor issues, and about political issues beyond labor, such as apartheid, civil rights, and women's rights, are well-represented in the extensive number of images in the Demonstrations and Rallies sub-subseries. The Personalities sub-subseries encompasses well-known public personalities and celebrities from outside of the Local, at Local events or at gatherings of allied organizations. Other sub-subseries of particular interest are Worksite--which, though small in number, contains valuable images of union members at work--and Other Organizations, which contains images that relate to labor, social, and political organizations with which Local 420 has associated itself (in particular the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP), and Political, which includes images showing important local, state, and national politicians interacting with the union and its leadership, and with other labor leaders. The images in Oversized Mounted Photographs series appear to have been produced for an exhibit or exhibits; almost all are black and white and mounted mostly on foam-board; they range in size from 19 ¾ x 13 inches to 20x30 inches and each has been individually numbered on the back. Smaller prints of many of these same images can be found in other parts of the Collection.
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| I, Black and white prints | ||
| II, Color prints | ||
| III, Black and white negatives | ||
| IV, Color negatives | ||
| V, Color transparencies | ||
| VI, Color slides | ||
| VII, Oversized (black and white) mounted prints | ||
Related Material at the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Records of AFSCME, DC 37, Local 420 (Wagner #215). For further biographical and historical information on Local 420 and to review the scope and contents of its Records, see Guide to the Records of AFSCME, Local 420, Hospital Workers.
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Separated Material
Fifteen plastic and canvas banners have been separated and placed in the Tamiment/Wagner ephemera and artifacts collections; nineteen picket signs have been separated and placed in the Tamiment/Wagner picket signs collection.
Return to topRestrictions
Access Restrictions
Open for research without restrictions.
Use Restrictions
Permission to publish materials must be obtained in writing from the:
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-2630
Fax: (212) 995-4225
E-mail: gail.malmgreen@nyu.edu
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Administrative Information
Provenance
The photographs of AFSCME, Local 420 were donated to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, in the spring of 2004, under an agreement with Local President Carmen Charles.
Preferred Citation
Published citations should take the following form:
Identification of item, date (if known); The AFSCME, Local 420, Hospital Workers Photographs; NP 212; box number; folder number;
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives ;
New York University
Container List
[The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection.]