Lillian Roberts is currently the Executive Director of DC37, the largest municipal union in New York City. She was first elected to this position in 2002.
Roberts was originally a nurse’s aide, and was secretary of the University of Chicago Hospital local when she was invited by Victor Gotbaum to join his AFSCME union staff in Chicago. This began a professional relationship between Gotbaum and Roberts that lasted for years. When Gotbaum became head of DC37, Roberts joined him in New York as a director of hospital field operations, and eventually became Associate Director in charge of organization.[1]. In 1969, she was jailed for two weeks for defying New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and leading a strike against three mental hospitals.[2] In 1981, after events which decreased her power in DC37, she left the union and was appointed as New York State industrial commissioner, the first black woman to hold such a high post in New York.[3] From 1987 to 1992, she was senior vice president of Total Health Systems, an HMO. DC37 was involved in a major scandal in the late 1990s, and Roberts return to DC37 as Executive Director in 2002, was seen, as noted in Robert's words, as a return to that "old time religion".[4].