Milly Silva
Milly Silva, a veteran trade union leader and community organizer, started work as the PSC’s new executive director at the beginning of January. In this busy and critical time for the union, she vowed to “lace up my sneakers, because I’ve got to get ready to run.”
Silva comes to the PSC after a 20-plus year career building worker power at SEIU 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, the nation’s largest healthcare union. Most recently, she served as the union’s secretary treasurer.
Silva learned her organizing skills early on as a community organizer at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. It was there that she learned how to connect workers and neighbors with each other, take “action for policy change, build capacity, and hold people accountable.”
When she turned her energy to organizing home healthcare workers, Silva was recruited by 32BJ SEIU, which at the time represented these kinds of workers. She came aboard as an assistant to the Homecare Trustees of 32BJ in 1999 and eventually led the merger of these workers into 1199, the New York City based powerhouse for healthcare workers. When the home healthcare workers migrated into 1199, so did Silva.
In the following years, she led organizing drives to bring thousands of non-union workers into the labor movement, negotiated contracts that improved pay, benefits, and working conditions for tens of thousands of union members, and won a multi-year statewide legislative and political campaign to enact minimum staff-to-resident ratios for nursing homes. In 2013, she was the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey.
Silva said she is excited to join the PSC and hopes to not only “lift up the profession to ensure faculty and staff’s rights as union members” but to “lift the students as well.”
There is a lot on the PSC’s agenda this semester, including defending immigrants, standing up for academic freedom, and fighting for increased city and state funding for CUNY. Silva said she is excited and ready for all of it and has been working each day to learn about the PSC-CUNY contract and the union’s history. “Every day I’m going to learn something new,” she said.
Silva vowed to talk to members regularly and to be “closely attuned to the needs of the PSC membership.”
She recently told the Chief, “I will be learning more about the intricacies of the education system and how it is that we’ve been able to effectively advocate and win. But core organizing and advocacy and negotiations–those are skills that I bring and I’m excited to be able to work and support our leadership team in moving that agenda.”
PSC President James Davis said, “Milly Silva joins the PSC team at a time of immense challenge and opportunity, and I can’t imagine anyone better prepared for both. After a national search for the union’s next Executive Director yielded a terrific, diverse pool of candidates, Milly stood out as exceptionally talented, a gifted leader, team-builder, and manager with deep roots in the labor movement in NYC and beyond. I am excited for our members to get to know her.”
Published: January 27, 2026
