New Jersey labor leader Ana Maria Hill has been named Vice President of the largest building service worker union in the nation, 32BJ SEIU. The union represents 185,000 members across 12 states and D.C., including 15,000 in New Jersey, where the union represents janitorial workers, security officers, airport workers, residential porters, K-12 cafeteria personnel and custodial workers.

Hill will be serving as Vice President and New Jersey State Director of 32BJ SEIU. Hill’s appointment as 32BJ SEIU New Jersey State Director in May 2024 was celebrated by Governor Phil Murphy.

As a daughter of Mexican and Colombian immigrants, Hill grew up in a household where the goal was to achieve the American Dream, yet the daily struggle was to place food on the table. She was the first in her family to graduate from High School and the first in her family to go to college. At Barnard College of Columbia University, she found her passion lied in improving the quality of life of working families in New York and gradually came to realize that the only way was through the labor movement and politics.

From 2008 to 2010, she worked at Make the Road NY conducting fieldwork for her thesis on how undocumented immigrants achieve workplace justice through education, mobilization and collective action. Soon after graduating from Barnard in 2009, she started working at 32BJ SEIU and never left. Ana Maria has worked in various departments in New York and New Jersey, culminating in her current role as the State Director of 32BJ.

In 2012 she was named a Luce Scholar and from 2012 through 2013 she lived in Beijing, China working for Compassion for Migrant Children, now INCLUDED, an organization that builds community centers in the heart of migrant cities throughout China and parts of Asia to provide services for migrant workers and their children.

Most recently in December of 2023, Ana Maria was part of the team that helped secure one of the strongest contracts that commercial cleaners have seen in New Jersey. A contract that includes strong raises and for the first time, a pension for close to 5,000 members that work in the suburbs of Northern and Central Jersey in over 500 buildings.

Throughout her time at SEIU 32BJ, Ana Maria has worked tirelessly to improve the lives of all working people in New Jersey, regardless of their union affiliation, through coalition building, politics and positive legislation that raises standards for all.

Ana Maria currently lives in Harrison, New Jersey with her husband Donnell Hill, Reentry Director at Urban League of Essex and their two sons, Elijah Diego Hill, age 5 and Noah Alvaro Hill, age 3.