Former AFSCME Leader Elected AFL-CIO Executive VP

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.afscme.org/publications/16585.cfm

Arlene Holt-Baker, former AFSCME International Union area director in California, has been elected executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. Holt-Baker worked for AFSCME from the late 1980s to 1995. She will fill the unexpired term of retiring Exec. Vice Pres. Linda Chavez-Thompson, another AFSCME alumna.


Arlene Holt-Baker Photo Credit: Jay Mallin


Holt-Baker is the first African American to serve as one of the top three executive officers of the 10-million-member federation. “I am truly honored and humbled by this opportunity to serve America’s working people, and to follow in the footsteps of such a groundbreaking leader,” she says. “Linda Chavez-Thompson touched countless lives through the battles she fought and causes she championed. I will do everything in my power to live up to her example and to support working men and women as they struggle for the rights and freedoms they so richly deserve.”

“We are very proud of Arlene,” says AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. “Her dedication to the labor movement is deep-rooted, and her vision of a future in which workers continue to make great strides to improve their lives is a clear one. She’s a fighter.”

The child of a domestic worker, Holt-Baker was just a teenager when she got her first job – an after-school position in a program established through President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” initiative. Later, she became a laborer in Fort Worth, Texas. Over the next three decades, she was a union and grassroots organizer.

In California, Holt-Baker helped public-sector workers form unions with AFSCME, and to win contracts that provided improved wages and pay equity for women. As an International Union area director, she worked with AFSCME council and local leaders to mobilize union voters in various national, statewide, county and municipal elections.

At the AFL-CIO, she helped defeat the anti-worker Prop. 226 in California, and was instrumental in organizing a massive show of support for the more than 20,000 migrant strawberry workers in the state who were struggling to build a union with the United Farm Workers. In 2004, Holt-Baker left the AFL to lead Voices for Working Families, which registered and mobilized thousands of women and people of color to vote in under-registered communities.

Two years later, she returned to the AFL-CIO take charge of its Gulf Coast Recovery effort.