Barbara Rahke, labor organizer who changed the face of the United Autoworkers, dies at 75

In the spring of 1979, a 30-year-old Boston University secretary led her coworkers — 850 of them — out on strike.

The secretaries and librarians, most of them women and some in high heels, blocked garbage trucks and marched alongside faculty, toting handmade signs. The university president yelled at them to get back to work, while off-duty police officers hired by the university grabbed at them.

It had been nearly a year since the university had refused to recognize their union. The secretaries had put their trust in that 30-year-old, their leader — a charismatic, pit bull of a woman from Indianapolis named Barbara Rahke.

Ms. Rahke died in her Francisville home on Feb. 1 from coronary artery disease, her stepdaughter Jennifer Kurz said. She was 75.

The successful Boston University campaign was the beginning of Ms. Rahke’s career as a labor organizer who transformed the face of the United Autoworkers, one of the nation’s largest unions, empowered women through workers’ rights struggles, and mentored countless women organizers.

Later, she revived the city’s worker safety organization, the Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health, or PhilaPOSH, expanding its reach to some of the most vulnerable workers: immigrant construction workers not represented by a union.

The second child of four to a professor and a homemaker, Ms. Rahke was born to what she described as a very conservative, antiunion family. It was through her experiences in the workforce that she became politicized.

At Boston University, she was discouraged to find that she could barely afford to take classes and finish her education because her secretarial pay was so low and tuition was high, even for employees. She took a second job waitressing.

While working at the university, she realized how much shame she felt about her job, a role she and her coworkers often described as just a way station. She called it an aha moment.

“At that point, I felt like, I am an office worker, I work my tail off, I produce work for all kinds of professors, I am getting paid nothing, and if anything … I should be screaming it from the rafters,” she said in a 2006 interview for the Walter Reuther Archives at Wayne State University. She said she realized, “We deserved respect and dignity, and a decent wage and a rose.”

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Ms. Rahke left her secretary job to organize for the United Autoworkers, the union that eventually represented her BU colleagues. There, she crossed the country organizing workers — from state employees in Indiana to Nissan in Tennessee. She did not fit the mold at the UAW in many ways: She didn’t come from the auto industry, she was younger than most, and she was a woman. But her unique perspective transformed the UAW.

Ben Perkins, UAW’s now-retired director of organizing, credits Ms. Rahke with changing the face of the UAW when she masterminded a 1985 campaign to organize 25,000 state employees in Michigan — the single largest local in the union at the time.

Before then, the union’s membership was largely male autoworkers. The Michigan state campaign expanded the UAW’s membership to include tens of thousands of women office workers, which required a shift in philosophy and culture. The union subsequently changed its constitution to refer to “he/she” instead of “he” and instead of “plant” referred to “workplace.”

“We said, the UAW stands for ‘Union of All Workers’ " Perkins said.

Her colleagues remember her as a brilliant, creative organizer who could organize all manner of workers: white-collar, blue-collar, pink-collar.

One of the difficulties of organizing women, Ms. Rahke said in the 1980s, was that they were trained to see themselves as “servers, not doers.” But she loved seeing women experience their own aha moments as they got involved with the union, said Judy Harden, who organized with Ms. Rahke at the UAW. “When they began to see that they had power,” Harden said, “when they could make the university listen when it didn’t want to.”

Ms. Rahke was a mentor and inspiration to a legion of organizers and labor leaders like Carolyn York, a former top official at the National Education Association, who said it was Ms. Rahke who inspired her to first get involved at a union drive of thousands of clerical, technical, and maintenance workers at Cornell in 1980.

UAW organizer Lauren Farrell said she walks around with “Barbara-isms” all day: “Never feel defeated on a campaign. Whatever the boss says, flip it back on them and make it work for you.”

“She told me, ‘Don’t you dare let any of these men call you honey or baby,’” Farrell said.

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Ms. Rahke retired from the UAW in 2002 and moved to Francisville from South Jersey after she and her husband divorced. She stayed in the area to be near her stepchildren, whom she treated as her own, Kurz said.

She then brought PhilaPOSH back to life, said a former board member, Kathy Black. As head of PhilaPOSH for 15 years, Ms. Rahke got its first federal grant, hired bilingual trainers to conduct safety trainings for immigrant workers, and developed a robust network of families of workers who had been killed on the job. Long after she retired from PhilaPOSH in 2019, she was still advising the organization, up until a few weeks before her death.

“She worried about everything and everybody else before herself,” said Nicole Fuller, director of PhilaPOSH. “She was just that type of person.”

Ms. Rahke is survived by three stepchildren, eleven grandchildren, three siblings, her partner and his daughter.

Donations can be made to PhilaPOSH on the website or to PhilaPOSH, 3001 Walnut St., 5th Floor, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104. A memorial service will be announced at a later date.