Washington – Anna Burger was on her first post-college job less than a month when she staged her first employee walkout.
She had graduated from Penn State with a sociology degree and was working as a social worker in Philadelphia on a nonpermanent basis in a former automotive warehouse.
A rainfall became a downpour one day, and water seeped through the walls onto electrical cords.
Less than 24 hours later, she organized a picket line to protest working conditions. It made the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer, with her in the middle of the photo.
“The good news was, I ended up not losing my job, I remained active in the union and my dad was quite proud of me,” recalled Burger during a recent interview in the downtown Washington offices of the 1.8-million- member Service Employees International Union, where she serves as secretary-treasurer.
Thirty-three years after the walkout, Burger is arguably the most influential woman in the U.S. labor movement – and involved in another walkout.
This one – a new labor organization called Change To Win – includes three unions that walked away from the AFL-CIO this summer, one that left several years ago and three others. More may follow.
Burger, 54, serves as chairwoman of the fledgling 6- million-member group and is planning a Sept. 27 convention in St. Louis to formally establish it as a new labor federation.
Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which left the AFL-CIO to join the new seven- union coalition, said the presidents of the unions – all men – wanted to select someone who would represent their effort to reach out to women and minorities.
“The American labor movement needs to have more women in leadership positions,” said Jack Cipriani, eastern regional vice president for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “She has a special brand of passion.”
She also has the ability to talk about workplace issues from the standpoint of a mother.
Burger raised her 19-year-old daughter, Erin, by bringing her to voter-registration drives, demonstrations and news conferences.
A 1988 photo of her daughter – at the time only a toddler – shows her on stage at an event lobbying for passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which eventually was signed into law by President Clinton.
Her parents, both union members, also have been an influence. When she was growing up, her father was a disabled trucker and her mother worked as a nurse in a nursing home.
The reason for the break with the AFL-CIO was that leaders of the dissident unions thought the federation was putting too much emphasis on supporting candidates for political office and not enough on recruiting new members.
For Burger, the split does not mean that organized labor will lose its unified voice on social issues such as an increase in the minimum wage, the need for good employer-provided health insurance coverage and the right of workers to form unions.
“My goal is that working people speak for working people in this country and that I can give them a voice,” she said.
