Gayle Kirshenbaum
Gayle Kirshenbaum is a long-time member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s Employers for Justice Network, a former board member of JFREJ, and a leader in the social justice working group, Kolot Chayeinu, the first synagogue to take on the domestic workers’ justice campaign as a congregation. She gave this speech at several press conferences in 2009.
My name is Gayle Kirshenbaum and I’m a member of the New York City-based Employers for Justice Network, a project of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. We are current and former employers of nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers of the ill and elderly who have come to Albany to say now is the moment for lawmakers to recognize this industry by passing the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. We are here to ask legislators to recognize the hidden workforce that holds together our households—and contributes mightily to our state’s economy—everyday. We are here to ask for clear standards for the many families who want to be good employers but do not know what that looks like. What they do know is that they want their loved ones cared for with love; what they need to learn is how to care for the caregivers.
Our current laws fail to see domestic workers as deserving of basic labor standards or even the right to form a union. In my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and in other upper-income communities in our city and state, domestic employers take advantage of their workers’ statutory neglect every day. Among many families in my community, there is widespread resignation—or outright indifference—to balancing the issues of work and family on the backs of a vulnerable immigrant class.
Many domestic employers simply fail to recognize that their homes are workplaces, resulting in ill-defined or changing job descriptions and minimal benefits. Workers are suddenly asked to clean the house and do laundry when they were originally hired only for child care; they’re expected to work hours of overtime with little notice and no extra pay; they’re asked to postpone urgent medical appointments because the time was inconvenient for the employer; they’re never considered for a raise or severance after multiple years on the job.
The Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights would serve as a wake up call to many of these employers, establishing long overdue standards for workers who make it possible for the rest of New York to go to work every day. State standards would create the conditions for better communication, accountability, and mutual respect between domestic employers and employees. State standards would create the conditions for justice in our homes.
I hope to one day tell my adult son about Debbie, the domestic worker who cared for him when he was a baby. Debbie, the woman from Jamaica who succeeded in getting him to take a nap, who carried his stroller up four flights of stairs, who was the first to make him laugh from his belly, who labored in our small apartment for a paycheck to take home to her own children and to contribute to her son’s college education, harboring the same aspirations for her life and her children as those held by the first generation of his family who came from Eastern Europe to the U.S.
I hope to one day tell him that the value of Debbie’s work to our family was, at long last, honored by New York State in the form of a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.
