MADAME CHAIR : She Had a Long Climb Through the Rank and File to the Podium at the AFL-CIO National Convention

Mary Yunt stood at the podium in the Anaheim Hilton Hotel before 2,500 delegates and guests this week to officially open the biennial convention of the nation’s largest labor organization, the AFL-CIO. The one-time clerical worker had risen through the ranks to temporarily chair the 30th anniversary convention of the 13.2-million-member union, where for four days issues ranging from boycotts to international aid would be debated.

On the second day of the convention, an old friend spotted Yunt in the hotel.

“It was so thrilling to see you up there,” said Eleanor Glenn, a member of the Service Employees International Union in Los Angeles. “Every woman was with you. It’s about time. It’s a very welcome change. We’ve worked hard for it, and they (the AFL-CIO) have responded.”

The reception was not always so warm. After a career dotted with political, labor and office jobs, she was elected in 1979 in a bitterly divisive campaign to head the Orange County Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

“There had never been a woman (secretary-treasurer), and there was some feeling that perhaps a woman couldn’t do it,” Yunt recalled in an interview. “I won that first election by about 12 votes” of about 150 votes cast by delegates representing affiliated unions.

A major goal for Yunt in 1979 was to increase the number of unions affiliated with the Council. Before her election, there were about 35 AFL-CIO affiliates in Orange County, she said. Today there are 95 to 100. Perhaps as another measure of her leadership, Yunt was unopposed when she ran for reelection a year later. But in the election last year, Yunt was opposed by a male candidate again. And again, the issue of whether a woman could handle the job was raised. “It was just something that didn’t seem to have gone away,” she said.

Yunt was reelected by a margin of about 3 to 1.

“My pitch . . . was I felt that if the labor movement was united, everybody could benefit because we could move forward with one voice,” Yunt said. “That has occurred (despite) the recession and with an (Reagan) Administration that seems to be saying it’s OK to ask for wage take-aways.” Increasingly, women have been attaining leadership positions within the AFL-CIO, particularly under the presidency of Lane Kirkland, Yunt said.

Two women now sit on the AFL-CIO executive council, she said. In Connecticut, a woman recently became the first female president of a state AFL-CIO.

About 30% of the AFL-CIO’s members are women. AFL-CIO spokesman Rex Hardesty said that is still well below the figures for the number of women in the total work force, which is almost 50%.

Steady Climb in Women Members

“But the number of women members we have has climbed steadily in recent years,” Hardesty said.

And there still are only three women besides Yunt who head the 26 central labor councils in California, she said. “I think they still have to keep working at it,” she said.

On Tuesday, as delegates filed into a vast auditorium at the Anaheim Hilton for the second day of the AFL-CIO national convention, Yunt was meeting privately at the hotel with former Rep. Jerry M. Patterson to discuss the possibility that he may run for Congress in 1986. Patterson is scheduled to announce his intentions at a press conference today.

Last year Patterson lost his 38th Congressional District seat to Republican Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove. In 1984, the Orange County Central Council worked hard on behalf of candidates, including Patterson.

“That was really an assignment to do all we could for the presidential and vice presidential candidates, but we were definitely assigned to hold on to as many of the congressional seats as possible,” she said. “Our target was the 38th (Congressional District), and, of course, we lost.”

The 38th District, which Patterson represented for five terms, is only 49% Democratic, at best only a marginal district for Democrats. But in conservative Orange County, Yunt has had some experience with uphill struggles.

In her opening remarks on Monday, Yunt welcomed delegates to “anti-union” Orange County, which, she said, “has not been considered friendly territory.”

Yet, each of the international unions represented at the convention have affiliates in Orange County, and about 150,000 union members live here, Yunt said.

Despite the union’s advances, Yunt said, “the last two years have been very difficult in negotiating contracts.”

Divorced Mother of Three

A mother of three, Yunt, 55, is divorced and lives in Irvine. Her first union affiliation was as a member of the Teamsters, which is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Later, she was director of the women’s activities section of the California AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education and worked one year for Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) as a statewide labor coordinator.

Alan Kistler, director of the AFL-CIO Organization and Field Services Department in Washington said Orange County’s “political atmosphere may not be attuned to the views of the labor movement. (But) I think the labor movement in Orange County is a growing movement, both in numbers and in influence.”

“Where a labor movement is in sort of a minority status in terms of the political milieu, it takes considerable skill to keep that labor movement up front and well respected,” Kistler said. “I think that is the case with Mary Yunt.”

‘Assignments of Special Importance’

Kistler called Yunt “an extraordinary individual, highly dedicated, hard-working trade union leader.” The national AFL-CIO, he said, has sent her on “assignments of special importance,” including a trip to Israel to study trade unionists there.

This year, he said, she went on a fact-finding trip to Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

One of the ironies of union work is that its leaders, including Yunt, become members of management, supervising the work of employees who work for the union.

Yunt said she changed her membership in a union that represents office workers to the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers because “the boss should not belong to the same union” as her employees.

Kistler, who works with Yunt regularly, said that “even among those whose views she does not share, there is respect for her integrity.”

Related story in Part I, Page 3.