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Best of the Bronx 2008 Honoree: John Sweeney

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The son of Irish immigrants, his father was a bus driver, his mother a domestic worker like so many Irish immigrant women of the time, John Sweeney’s union career began as a research assistant with the Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1960, he joined SEIU as a contract director for New York City Local 32B. He went on to become union president and to lead two citywide strikes of apartment maintenance workers.
Vowing to stand with the “powerless and the disregarded”, he was Irish America magazine’s Irish American of the year in 2004. At the Democratic Convention in Denver he pledged his members’ support for Barack Obama. Addressing the Convention, Sweeney said ordinary Americans “deserve a better America, an America where every worker can count on a good job, where every family has health care, where every senior enjoys a decent retirement.”
Sweeney is fiercely proud of his Irish Catholic roots and his family roots the Bronx. “We knew that without our family, there could be no love,” he said. “Without the church, there would be no hope of redemption. And without my father’s union, there would be no food on the table.”
The recipient of numerous national and international awards, Sweeney is the author of “America Needs A Raise: Fighting for Economic Security and Social Justice.”

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