CORRECTION APPENDED
My childhood Sedarim involved a slight disconnect. Perhaps yours did, too. Here we were, a big tableful of upper middle class white folks, reclining on pillows around a beautifully set dining room table, discussing our history as slaves… while Mrs. Dyer, our cleaning lady, bustled about in the kitchen, ladling out the matzoh ball soup and scrubbing the haroset-smeared dishes.
A lot of us employ minority women in our homes — not just as Seder helpers, but as housecleaners, nannies and elder care providers. Many of these helpers are immigrants, just as our people once were. These women come from the Caribbean, Asia and Latin America rather than Russia and Germany, but they want the same American Dream our grandparents did. Our great-bubbes and -zeydes often began their lives as Americans working in low-wage jobs too.
And unfortunately, like our ancestors who sweated in places like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, these immigrants have very little protection from exploitation. Domestic workers are exempt from protection under most labor laws. Most of us want to treat our employees humanely, but unfortunately, that’s not universally so. Every few months a story breaks about someone holding an immigrant woman as a virtual slave, paying less than minimum wage, forcing her to work horrid hours. Two years ago, a Long Island couple held two Indonesian women as prisoners in their home, beating them, slashing them with knives, working them day and night, making them sleep in closets and never allowing them outside except to take out the garbage. And for every Grand Guignol horror story like that one, there are thousands of small-scale tales of dehumanizing, un-mensch-like employer behavior. Yes, even among Jews.
That’s why Jews for Racial and Economic Justice campaigns for fairness toward domestic workers. Its program, Shalom Bayit, or “peace in the house”, is based on the notion that justice begins at home. As Jews, people who’ve historically been active in the union movement, vocal about the need for fair and safe workplaces, fierce in our pursuit of justice on behalf of oppressed people in America and throughout the world, we need to look into our own kitchens and living rooms to make sure we’re being good employers. I’ve heard too many stories of people (yes, tribe members!) trying to underpay nannies, letting them go with little notice and no severance, expecting them to be on constant call.
That’s why I think it’s cool that JFREJ, in partnership with Domestic Workers United, an association of immigrant women in the home-care labor force, helped pressure the City Council to pass New York’s first legislation to protect domestic workers’ rights. Now they’re aiming to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in the New York State Senate.
These rights would include at least one day off per week; up to 12 weeks of family and medical leave; paid sick-days, vacations and holidays; a health care stipulation; advance notice of termination, and severance in accordance with number of years worked. The bill seems realistic in its scope — it doesn’t address the immigration status of domestic workers, and doesn’t require anything massively financially untenable.
It seems particularly appropriate to take a hard look at our own domestic-helper-related practices when Passover rolls around. After all, this holiday wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of Shifra and Puah — two midwives, the contemporary equivalent of domestic workers — who saved Jewish male newborns. And then we have Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter, who had their own big roles to play in the story of Jewish liberation from slavery.
So JFREJ has produced a Haggadah supplement that draws parallels between our people’s experiences in Egypt and domestic workers’ current struggles. (There’s currently a link to it from JFREJ’s home page at jfrej.org.) The supplement includes a question from a kindergartner: “What does it mean to be a slave? Is it like being the cleaning lady who doesn’t speak English?”
Often, when our kids say innocent things that feel racially insensitive to us, our instinct is to hush them immediately, to brush their comments away and to bobble the teachable moment. If a kindergartner at a Seder only interacts regularly with one person of color, the one who mops his family’s floors and doesn’t speak his language, it’s no wonder he’s jumped to certain conclusions. But educating him doesn’t mean hastening to stammer, “Consuela isn’t a slave! Ha ha! Someone fill the fourth cup, fast!” You owe it to the kid and to the planet to provide a diverse picture of our country. We now have a bi-racial president from a multiracial and multicultural family. Being insular doesn’t play anymore.
The issue of treating people of color respectfully as well as with economic fairness is the subject of a whole other column. But I can’t tell you how many clueless, if well-meaning, comments I’ve heard about the fundamental suited-ness of entire ethnic groups as sitters. “I’d only hire a Filipino nanny!” one acquaintance of mine gushed. (Note: People who say things like this never know they mean “Filipina.”) “They’re so caring,” my acquaintance continued.
“That’s why there are so many Filipino nurses.” I’ve also heard, more than once, “Jamaicans are good nannies for boys, because they’re the best disciplinarians and they play very physically.” And “Tibetans are the gentlest by nature. They’re Buddhist so they’re very loving.” (Tibetan nannies, in certain NYC communities, are huge status symbols. They make you look gloriously enlightened. They’re like human prayer beads, or a red string bracelet with legs! And I’m told you can pay them less than you do other ethnic groups — huge bonus!) Guess what, parents? Humans are individuals. No group is “by nature” anything. Hey, stop counting your gold coins and controlling the media and listen to me.
Hiring someone to take care of your children is perhaps the most important decision you make as a working parent. This person cuddles, feeds, changes and disciplines the people you love most in the universe. How can you nickel-and-dime someone who has such a vital role in your family’s functioning? How can you view a caregiver as an ethnic signifier with given personality traits, instead of as a human being? The people who take care of our children are real heroes today, and in the Passover story.
Correction: The March 27 East Village Mamele column, “Domestic Workers’ Rights: A Matter of Ethics,” misstated that the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights includes a living wage of $12 per hour. The bill does not include a living wage. It does, however, include a health care stipulation.
Write to Marjorie at mamele@forward.com.
That we are in the year 2009 and this issue still hasn't been resolved in the Jewish community speaks volumes, to many, of how many (not all) Jews view non-Jews, in particular, "minorities."
As a soon-to-be Black Jew living in Boro Park, I always cringed seeing these workers slave away for so many kids and often not being valued for the hard work they put in. And much of the views that these kids hold for these folks is extended to others in the community. Lacking the ability to say hello to a neighbor and treating your help as such is a trait, unfortunately, that is a part of too many Jews that employ these women.
These laws are just a start but until the community truly gets on one another to eschew such behavior, none of it, laws aside, will change.
For a people with such a vast history of slavery and being treated as second-class citizens, it makes my stomach churn to find that thousands of years later (for some) no lessons have been learned.
Dear Marjorie and readers,
Thank you so much for bringing this issue to light. JFREJ and Domestic Workers United, and over 100 other endorsing organizations, have the opportunity to get this bill passed this year. Please join us on April 23rd, 2009, 7pm at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, 257 w 88th st, for "The Jewish Community Stands with Domestic Workers" to join with leaders and legislators and hundreds of supporters in the New York Jewish Community to show support for the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights.
Please follow this link to RSVP: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/884/event/index.jsp?event_KEY=47879
Can't wait to see you there, Lane
It is unfortunately impossible for there to be true justice for domestic workers, since the very nature of the relationship between employer and domestic worker is inherently unequal and exploitative. Enough with the euphemisms: let's call a spade a spade and "domestic workers" what they really are - "servants."
The notion of anyone in this supposed land of the free employing servants -- copying the effete and decadent aristocracies of Europe and their robber-baron analogs on these shores -- should fill any right-thinking human being with revulsion. To bring a stranger -- usually a minority, usually an immigrant, always someone much less affluent than her employer -- into one's home, a home much more luxurious than any she could ever afford herself, to clean up the filth and detritus of living that the employer apparently is too "busy" to handle himself or herself cannot help but be demeaning to the worker.
I have some sympathy for families with children both of whose parents must work to make ends meet. It is a sad comment on the alienation inherent in late-stage capitalist civilization that these families have little choice other than to enter into a monetary transaction with a stranger to carry out the domestic duties they are unable to do themselves. That is sad and dehumanizing and we should, as a society, be able to do better.
I have no sympathy for the single people or childless couples who consider themselves too important to do their own laundry or vacuum their own floors.
A Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights is a good stopgap measure, but it is just a treatment, not a cure. No one should be subjected to the indignity of having to be another person's servant. There will be no true justice until such time as conditions that create both the supply and the demand for such domestic servitude are remedied and eradicated.
Thanks, Marjorie, for writing so compellingly and clearly about this initiative. And thanks to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Domestic Workers United for working so hard on this really crucial and under-reported social justice/civil rights issue.
Daniel: I want to note that our kids' nanny (this is the title she prefers for herself) does not consider herself dehumanized, as far as I can determine, and I have worked hard over three years to make sure we're communicating clearly, have a strong collegial relationship, and that we are honoring her work in all possible ways. She has added richness and dimension and love to our lives, and I believe we have done the same for hers (and her family's). Just want to note that like everything in life, such relationships are complex and not easily judged.
I am just an ordinary, lower-middle class Jewish person, college-educated but unemployed because of the recession. I have never had a full-time maid or nanny, I have always done all my own housework by myself. Even now I can only afford a cleaner to help with the Pesach work once a week.
Maybe if domestic workers studied for years at special colleges and universities and earned Masters Degrees in Laundry Sorting, Diaper Changing, and Granite Countertop Scrubbing, they would have more valuable skills than Marjorie Ingall and could rightly demand to be paid more than she earns writing this silly crap for The Forward.
I am amazed that no one has considered the gender issues involved. If we agree that it is not ok to pay hired help for work, why is it ok to expect the lady of the house do all her cooking and cleaning for free. Let us not forget the reason why feminist seders have become popular in recent decades--as a rebuke to men who recline and proclaim their freedom at the seder, while their wives, after having busted their tuchases to clean the house and cook an elaborate seder diner, feel like collapsing, but are still expected to serve (a state of affairs that is probably far truer for most Jewish women who observe Passover, than the one Marjorie Ingalls describes.
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