On the evening of Tuesday, March 21st, three members of Domestic Workers United (DWU), 11 rabbis, and about 50 Jewish community members gathered to learn from one another’s experiences and from Jewish texts.
The event, a collaboration between Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and DWU, was part of the activist group’s Shalom Bayit campaign. Named for the commandment and priority of domestic peace, the movement aims to “bring together the Jewish values of building a peaceful home and creating a just workplace,” to support the rights of the over 200,000 domestic workers — nannies, housekeepers and elder care providers — who work in the New York area.
Beginning in 2002, JFREJ has worked with DWU, an organization of domestic workers who “want to make a change, gain respect and recognition, and establish fair labor standards,” organizing support for domestic workers’ rights in the context of the Jewish community and Jewish tradition. The partnership between DWU and Shalom Bayit counts the 2003 passage of Intro 96, the NY City Council Domestic Workers Bill, among its victories. The current goals include increasing the dignity of domestic work, prompting employers to create written contracts with their domestic workers and proposing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the NY State Legislature.
The Bill of Rights protections include ensuring domestic workers a living wage of $16/hour or $14/hour with health benefits, overtime pay, family and medical leave, paid holiday, vacation, sick and personal days, as well as advance notice of termination and severance pay. Domestic workers and agricultural workers are the only two groups of workers not protected under federal labor law.
“The system is set up so that our lives are valued less than women in other professions,” said DWU member Marlene Champion at the Rabbinical Council event.
Thus far, the partnership between JFREJ and DWU has resulted in employer-employee contracts, perhaps because “employers and domestic workers have a role to play in each other’s lives,” explained Champion. “We have to respect each other. We have to work together.”
“A lot of people believe in tikkun olam, but they need to realize that they are in the situation of being an employer and to step up and do the right thing as an employer,” said Catherine Bell, a member of Shalom Bayit. The first step, she said, is recognizing that they have the power to improve their workers’ lives.
Although many Jews in the metropolitan area are employers of domestic workers, “our Jewish story is very diverse….the Jewish community is very diverse, with differing relationships to low-wage workers,” said JFREJ Rabbinical Intern E Kukla.
For JFREJ, which was founded in 1990 as a result of the racial tensions in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the intimate nature of the Shalom Bayit campaign has fit in perfectly with its mission of bringing “a growing number of Jews into coalition work led by those who bear the brunt of racism and economic injustice.” The informal nature of economic relationships between domestic workers and their employers combined with the Jewish tradition of labor justice has propelled JFREJ to “try to reach out to Jewish institutions to build partnerships with synagogues around the issue,” said Bell. “Organizing in synagogues is new for us. The challenge is trying to reach people in synagogues who really want to make it their own.”
As a further step in the 25-member Rabbinical Council’s role in Shalom Bayit, members of the campaign created a supplement to the Passover haggadah, in hopes of bringing domestic labor issues to seder tables around the metropolitan area and involving more Jews in fighting for domestic workers’ rights.
“When I first came here to this country, I didn’t know I had rights, but now I know my rights…we are asking you to join us and fight for the rights of domestic workers,” entreated DWU member Beverly Alleyne, at the Rabbinical Council event.
The network of Jewish employers and domestic worker allies is growing as Shalom Bayit expands its campaign throughout the New York Jewish community. The organizations plan to continue working together, beginning with DWU’s congressional lobby day in Albany, on May 23.
