Farewell to a Working-Class Hero
Pat Carta was part of a generation of workers and organizers whose immense knowledge about overcoming fear to build class consciousness and worker power will never be found in a book.
Members of Local 34 at a rally supporting food service workers demanding better wages. (Local 34 – UNITE HERE / Facebook)
Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died.
I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, and fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now.
Though it’s been nearly thirty years now, two things about Pat stand out across the decades.
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