Betty C. Tianti
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| The nation's first woman president of a state AFL-CIO federation and Connecticut's first woman commissioner of labor, her final step in a 30-year career of assuming positions never before held by women.
Betty was born and raised in Plainfield and moved to Danielson following her marriage. In 1956, she started working as a machine operator at the American Thread Company in Willimantic, where she immediately joined the Textile Workers' Union of America. Within a few months, she not only was promoted to machine fixer, the first woman to hold that position, but she was also chosen to be union steward. Within two years, she was secretary-treasurer of Local 460, and a few years later, she was elected president of the same union. In 1967, she left the thread company to become the first woman deputy director of the union's Committee on Political Education (COPE). She returned to Connecticut three years later to become the first woman agent of the State Board of Labor Relations. In 1974, she accepted the position of Connecticut's Director of COPE and was later elected the first woman secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO Federation. Betty also served on a number of state commissions, including the Governor's Committee on the Status of Women (1973) and the Committee on Objective Job Evaluations and Pay Equity (1986-87). In 1985, Betty Tianti was elected president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, a position which she held until 1988 when she was named Commissioner of Labor, again an important first for a Connecticut woman. | |||||||||||
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