Laurel Leff Photo
Gwen Mills running city-changing New Haven aldermanic campaigns in 2011.
A second labor leader who honed organizing skills in New Haven has ascended to the top of the national UNITE HERE union.
The union — which represents 275,000 workers at hotels, casinos, airports, universities like Yale, and food service operations — has elected Gwen Mills president, the first woman to hold the position in its 130-year history.
Mills grew up in East Rock, attended Hooker and East Rock schools and High School in the Community before attending Cornell University. At 24, she returned home to launch a career as a UNITE HERE-affiliated community organizer and then the union’s statewide political director. In that role, she organized a slate of labor-affiliated candidates who took control of the Board of Alders in 2011 and has maintained control of the legislative body ever since. (Click here to read an in-depth story about that.)
Mills’s mentors included John Wilhelm, the Yale Local 34 and 35 organizer who went on to serve as UNITE HERE’s national president himself; as well as D. Taylor, who built the union’s Las Vegas casino locals.
Mills, who turns 50 on Tuesday, told the Independent she’s excited to work on building the union’s membership at “this hot moment for labor” as well as to use her political skills to help elect Democrats to the White House and U.S. Congress this year.
She said the national union will double the bucks and labor it expends on organizing new members during her five-year term.
“We have so many members who are housekeepers and cocktail servers and clerical workers. We have so many women who have built the union over the years. I’m proud to be able to represent them,” Mills said of her glass-ceiling barrier breaking.
She is building on lessons she learned on the ground in New Haven from 1999 to 2017.
UNITE HERE will seek to replicate its success in gaining favorable hotel contracts last year in California and Arizona, in part through “rolling strikes,” for 40,000 union workers whose contracts expire this year at hotels in 22 U.S. and Canadian cities. One of those hotels is New Haven’s Omni.
During her years organizing in support of UNITE HERE’s contract battles with Yale, Mills said, she learned that “building a coalition of a lot of different people and different organizations is what it takes to win. In the campaigns against Yale, you needed all the unions. You needed the community groups. You needed the church groups. You needed the elected officials. There would be no way I would be president of this union if I hadn’t been grounded in that” approach.
UNITE HERE will also pour workers into the 2024 presidential and House and Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. (Mills directed the union’s 2016 ground game in Nevada against Trump.) The focus will be on undecided voters in working-class communities of color. One lesson she’ll apply from her New Haven political organizing days: seek to bring those voters face to face with neighbors and fellow workers who “have decided from their own experience that it’s worth it to keep fighting.”
“That’s how you move the needle,” Mills said. “It’s not just the message. It’s the messenger that matters.”