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........

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