Victor Gotbaum

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Victor Gotbaum was the head of DC37, the largest municipal union in New York City, from 1965-1987. Born on September 5, 1921, in Brooklyn, NY. Gotbaum married his first wife, Sarah Gotbaum, in August, 1943. He fought in World War II, attended Brooklyn College and the School of International Affairs at Columbia University, and took his first union job as assistant director of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, in Chicago, in 1955.[1]

When Victor Gotbaum assumed the leadership of DC37, he embarked on a series of activities that were successful in organizing thousands of workers in the municipal hospitals and creating for the first time in New York history the equivalent of a national labor relations board, the Office of Collective Bargaining.[2]

The New York unions in the Seventies, led by Victor Gotbaum and his colleagues, agreed to major concessions on their contract demands and to make investments in city bonds from their pension funds.[3]

Gotbaum was succeeded by Stanley Hill, who was removed in 1998 in the midst of a major scandal[4], some of which may have had its roots under Gotbaum. After a trusteeship by AFSCME, Hill was ultimately succeeded in 2002 by Lillian Roberts[[5]], who first started working with Gotbaum in 1959.

Gotbaum divorced his first wife, Sarah, in the 1970s, and subsequently married Betsy Gotbaum in 1976.[6] Betsy Gotbaum is currently the New York Public Advocate.