Her nephew Tony Berry said the cause was complications of stomach cancer. She had been in hospice care at home.
Miller believed that helping the sick, elderly and disabled was a critical service that the state of Illinois undervalued by paying thousands of workers poverty-level wages and offering no benefits.
“I took care of some people for 10 or 15 years, trying to give them to same kind of care I would give my own mother,” she said in a document published in 2003 by the Service Employees International Union when Miller was president of Local 880 in Illinois. “And it affects you. When you lose them it hurts the same as if they were a family member.”
Her activism began in earnest in the 1980s when she and her fellow workers were still categorized as independent contractors; while their local was affiliated with the SEIU, it did not have the fundamental right of unions to collectively bargain on behalf of its members. That would not come for many years — one of the many battles Miller helped to lead.
One of Local 880’s earliest fights was to bring all of its workers’ pay up to the prevailing minimum wage of $3.35 an hour; some of their time was deemed by the state as “supervisory pay,” which brought them only $1 an hour. In 1987, when she was a vice president of the local, Miller testified emotionally to the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield, asking lawmakers to consider how poorly she and her fellow workers were paid.
“It was the first time she had ever testified, and she was really intimidated,” Keith Kelleher, a top organizer during Miller’s time at Local 880, recalled in a telephone interview. “She told me, ‘I saw all those fancy people in their fancy suits and dresses and I was just a home-care worker.’ But she told them, ‘Don’t listen with your heads, listen with your hearts. Even if it is legal to pay us $1 an hour, we deserve a living wage.'”
The legislature soon after raised the workers’ pay to $3.50 an hour (the equivalent of $7.65 today) and eliminated the $1 supervisory pay.
Helen Ruth Ashford was born on May 26, 1936, to Buster and Clara Ashford, who managed their farm. Helen attended an all-black high school in segregated Louisville, then moved to Chicago after graduating, finding jobs in industrial laundries and marrying Collin Miller, a construction worker. After about 15 years of laundry work, she became a home-care worker.
Miller continued to work with her home-care clients, taking buses to care for them, even as she became increasingly active in the union.
She organized home care workers in other cities and led rallies and protests in Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. Sometimes, she led union members in the gospel song “Victory Is Mine,” other times declaring that they were like Moses telling the Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Kelleher recalled.
While speaking in 1995 at a White House Conference on Aging, she told the delegates about the home-care workers’ ongoing struggle for pay and respect.
“I love my job,” she said. “But please listen to me. We are never listened to. We make minimum wage without a single benefit, and yet we are the people who keep your mother, your father, your sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts out of nursing homes.”
She added: “We aren’t the greedy. We are the needy.”
After serving as the local’s treasurer and vice president, she was elected its president in 1999, serving for eight years until her retirement.
She also helped voter registration drives in the 1990s directed by Project Vote, which was led by Barack Obama before he was elected an Illinois state senator.
The union’s hard work paid off. Wages rose, fitfully, and in 2003, Illinois passed legislation that allowed the local to bargain collectively for its members. That right led home-care workers to negotiate for health insurance and take advantage of a state-funded education and training program that is now named for Miller.
She is survived by a sister, Johnnie Wells, and a brother, Hayward Ashford.
Kelleher said that during his visit to her last month, Miller still sounded like an agitated union leader.
“There she was, with stage 4 stomach cancer,” he said, “and as I walk in the door she starts saying, ‘Keith Kelleher, Local 880, I’m fired up! I can’t take it no more!’ That was one of our chants when we were going up against the state or a private company. And she’s still saying it on her deathbed.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.