District Council 37 Archiving Its Growth;

To Feature 50 Years of History
DC 37 Archiving Its Growth


District Council 37 has embarked on a two-year project to archive its birth and development as the city's largest public-sector labor union.

The Chief-Leader/Michel Friang 'PRESERVING THE PAST': Michael Nash, the director of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU, scoured District Council 37's records dating back to 1958 and found about 400,000 documents of historical importance. 'It's about preserving the historical memory of the labor movement,' he said. The archivist for the $156,000 project will start work this week, cataloging and preserving about 400,000 documents. The stacks of organizing files, correspondence, grievances, political-action papers and photographs date back to 1958. Tamiment Library at New York University will house the records and there will be an on-line index accessible to members on the DC 37 Web site.

'Learn From Our History'

"We have a rich and important history, and we need to preserve it," District Council 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts stated in an e-mail. "We want to be able to learn from our history so we can always do better."

LILLIAN ROBERTS: 'Preserving our past.' In 1979, NYU and the AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council entered into a joint project in which NYU was designated the repository for the CLC and member unions' historical records. The Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, which is part of Tamiment, now houses the records of 250 city and state unions, including the CLC, the State AFL-CIO and the United Federation of Teachers. Each individual union must give its permission and figure out a budget before the archiving process can get started.

This spring, Michael Nash, the director at the Wagner Archives, began rummaging through DC 37's closets and filing cabinets and collected a list of the files he believed were historically significant. Ms. Roberts signed off on the list, and the process of packing and transferring 200 boxes of papers began.

"It's about preserving the historical memory of the labor movement," said Mr. Nash. "Current members will be able to appreciate the struggles and what went into building the union."

Focus on Last Decade

The records currently being detailed and described by archivist Laura Helton, so that they are searchable by union members, academics and the general public, will only go through 1997 for now. Most unions hold onto records for about 10 years in case they are needed for business purposes. The archives are then updated each year.

"This union has always been in the vanguard of the progressive labor movement, and that makes our archives historically significant," said Ms. Roberts.

DC 37's proud history of winning some of the city's first collective-bargaining contracts and providing key benefits that generally weren't available to private-sector employees was marred in the late 1990s when a slew of leaders were indicted for stealing members' dues money and rigging a contract ratification vote. Much of that history became public after 1997, but Mr. Nash said the archive would not gloss over the union's less-proud moments.

"The new leadership wanted to open up the past completely," he asserted. "They did not shy away from us bringing in documents that really described the good and the not-so-good."

He emphasized that Ms. Roberts gave him a free hand in compiling the list of documents that would be preserved.

"It's such a cliché," he said, "but it's hard to plan for the future without knowing where you came from."