Arlene Holt Baker ~ At-Large Board Member

Executive Vice President

Arlene Holt Baker’s experience as a union and grassroots organizer spans more than 30 years. On Sept. 21, 2007, she was approved unanimously as executive vice president by the AFL-CIO Executive Council, becoming the first African American to be elected to one of the federation's three highest offices and the highest-ranking African American woman in the union movement. In this position, Holt Baker builds on her legacy of inspiring activism and reaching out to diverse communities to support the needs and aspirations of working people.

Holt Baker began her work in the labor movement with AFSCME. She moved through the ranks of AFSCME and, as an organizer and international union representative, was successful in helping to organize public-sector workers in California and helping them win contracts that provided better wages and pay equity for women.  As AFSCME's international union area director in California from the late 1980s to 1995, Holt Baker worked with AFSCME councils, locals, labor councils and allies advocating for working families. Also in California, she also helped run AFSCME's political activities, working with AFSCME council and local leaders to mobilize union voters in numerous national, statewide, county and municipal elections. Holt Baker was an active member of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

During that time, she was appointed by then-California Speaker of Assembly Willie L. Brown Jr. to serve on the Comparable Worth Task Force Committee and also sat on the board of directors of the Southern California Industrial Relations Research Association. Holt Baker has received numerous civic awards for her work as a labor and community advocate.

She was an active member of the California Democratic Party, serving as a state delegate to the Democratic National Convention for the elections held between 1980 and 1996 and as first vice chair of the state Democratic Party from 1993 to 1996.

In 1995, Holt Baker came to the AFL-CIO as executive assistant to Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. Her work included the successful campaign to defeat the anti-worker Prop. 226 in California, which was designed to weaken the voices of union members in the political process. She also was instrumental in organizing a massive labor-movement-wide show of support for the more than 20,000 migrant workers who pick and process strawberries in California, as the workers struggled to join a union through the Farm Workers.

As the first director of the AFL-CIO Voice@Work campaign in 1999, Holt Baker launched a dynamic movement to engage elected officials, clergy members, community leaders and others in support of workers’ freedom to form unions. In 2000, she ran the federation’s member education and get-out-the-vote effort in the key swing state of Pennsylvania and later coordinated the AFL-CIO’s Count Every Vote activity in the Florida recount.

Beginning in 2004, Holt Baker served as president of the nonpartisan voter education and mobilization effort Voices for Working Families, which registered and mobilized thousands of women and people of color to vote in under-registered communities.  She returned to the federation in 2006 to lead the AFL-CIO's Gulf Coast Recovery effort. That work has included partnering with the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust's Gulf Coast Revitalization Program and the Building Trades Gulf Coast Pilot Project to bring affordable housing and good jobs to people in the region. This also includes working closely with national and local advocates in fighting for the just rebuilding of the Gulf region.