Public Employee Press

Union mourns former Local 372 President Charles Hughes

Former Local 372 President Charles E. Hughes, who achieved major advances for low-paid school employees and built DC 37’s political power but ended his career in disgrace, died Aug. 30 of a heart attack. He was 68 years old.

During his 30 years at the helm of DC 37’s largest local, part-time school lunch workers, School Aides and others — who started at the minimum wage with no benefits — won pension rights, year-round pay and dramatic gains in pay and benefits. Empowered by his strong leadership, they attained once-lacking dignity and respect on the job.

“He had deep concern for the people he represented,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts at Hughes’s funeral, held Sept. 3 at Mount Moriah AME Church in Queens.

“Charlie Hughes went to war for low-income people,” said William Lucy, secretary-treasurer of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, DC 37’s national union. “He loved them and they loved him.”

Born in 1941 in Millen, Ga., Hughes picked cotton as a boy in the segregated South. He came to New York in 1961, went to work as a School Lunch Helper, and quickly became a union activist and shop steward.

Local president 1968-1998

Local 372 members elected him president in 1968. He helped make the union a political powerhouse by getting hundreds of members to volunteer in election campaigns and adapting business techniques to create DC 37’s first computerized telephone banks.

Hughes’s friendships with mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani led to more gains for the local. He worked hard to elect U.S. President Jimmy Carter and served on the commission that rewrote the national charter of the Democratic Party to include more women and minorities.

Tragically, the optimistic belief that anything was possible, which helped make him a great fighter for union members, led Hughes to excess. His union career ended abruptly in 1998 when AFSCME found the local deep in debt and replaced him with an administrator; in 2000, he pleaded guilty to stealing from the union.

Hughes is survived by his mother, Magnolia McCloud, his wife, Shirley, his children Martin, Charisse Rose and TiaJuana Brinson, three brothers, six sisters and nine grandchildren.