By Lily Sieradzki

This is my third month working at the New England Jewish Labor Committee. It’s been a wholly new experience but also one that makes total sense to me given my personal Jewish journey. I’ve known for some time that I wanted to act on my Jewish values of social justice. JLC’s work building solidarity between the Jewish community and the labor movement is my opportunity to do just that.
 
I grew up in a community strong in Jewish religious and cultural traditions. My parents were committed to immersing my sisters and me in our heritage, sending us to Jewish day school and regularly attending first a Conservative, then a Reconstructionist synagogue. We learned Hebrew, became familiar with Jewish texts and prayers, and celebrated Shabbat each week. My parents’ commitment to their communities, both in their jobs as public service workers for the federal government and in our synagogues, taught me the civic and political dimensions of being Jewish by their example.
 
My paternal grandfather’s story of escape and endurance as a Holocaust survivor was present in our household as well. During a class trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I looked up a picture of Grandpa Ben in the museum database. I was shocked to see the strong family resemblance between him at 18, recovering in Sweden after being liberated from Auschwitz, and myself.
 
As I grew older, I began to  recognize some of the limitations of the Jewish institutions surrounding me - the Jewish day school that was not financially accessible to my family, the Hebrew schools and the camps that refused to accommodate my sister Rachel, who is on the autism spectrum and the Jewish youth group that only allowed expression of certain views on Israel. Around this time, I was introduced to a new, different Jewish community in the form of Habonim Dror Camp Moshava.
 
Camp Moshava was and still is the pivotal experience that cemented my Jewish identity in relation to justice. The camp is part of Habonim Dror, an international Labor Zionist movement that uses informal education to empower youth to work toward justice both in Israel, Palestine, and in North America.
 
Camp Moshava, one of seven summer camps in North America, functions on a communal and youth-led model. As campers, we did physical labor each day to maintain the upkeep of our space - my favorite was always working in the garden. Later, on staff, we made decisions collectively with a circle-based, consensus model. We observed Shabbat in an informal, joyful and profoundly meaningful way, mostly rooted in Jewish dance and song.
 
Our Jewish practice and our education on issues of race, gender, class, sexual identity and the environment were all rolled into the same experience. We thought critically about our identities as American Jews and the implications: about our socioeconomic privilege to attend this summer camp and the imperative to fight for economic justice for all, and about our responsibilities toward working for a just and peaceful Israeli society. We were taught that we can and should turn our dreams for the world into reality.
 
Above all, the most compelling thing that I continue to take from Habonim Dror is that my identity as a Jew is not something I can turn on and off at will - it drives who I am and what I do. My Judaism is inherently political, as well as religious and cultural, and it contains certain imperatives to work toward justice not just for Jews, but for all people.
 
As a student at Tufts, I set out to deepen my understanding of systemic economic and racial injustice. My first contact with on-the-ground struggles for justice and with JLC came during the fight to stop the university from cutting janitorial jobs last spring. The real pain and urgency for these workers became tangible for me, as did the selfless commitments of the student activists. After months of community advocacy, meetings and rallies, the university administration began making cuts this past summer, although they cut fewer janitors than they had originally planned to. The janitors’ resilience and the students’ determination to continue fighting for workers’ rights on campus have made me see the ongoing importance of this work.
 
When I graduated, I felt strongly that I needed to find work reflected my values and put them into action, that took responsibility as a member of my Jewish community and felt morally and spiritually fulfilling. I was interested in exploring the liberatory potential of Judaism. JLC embodied and enacted that potential.  JLC’s stand with working people in their struggles for economic justice stems from who we are as Jews.
 
Now at JLC, I’m learning so much about workplace equity issues and the amazing workers and leaders who put so much of themselves toward fighting for just working conditions with the Fight for $15 and the Paid Family and Medical Leave bills. I’m starting to understand the victories of the labor movement, the work ahead of us, and the invaluable role of faith groups in these powerful coalitions.

I am still working as an educator and seeking to connect Jewish values with justice via JLC’s new campus initiative. The initiative seeks to engage Jewish college students in histories of Jews in the labor movement, to mobilize them into ongoing efforts for workplace justice in the Boston area. Working here at the JLC has made me feel that I, along with our many partners, am involved in the Jewish pursuit of building a new, better, more just future.

Lily Sieradzki is currently working as Program Manager at the New England JLC. She has previously worked as Educational Director and Inclusion Coordinator at Habonim Dror Camp Moshava. This is her second year teaching kindergarten at the Boston Workmen's Circle Shule.

​ By Jacob Schlitt

​As we begin the Hebrew year 5776, it got me to thinking about 1776. True, there is no connection between the two, but it seems as if there should be, both ending in 776. It was on July 4, 1776 that a remarkable group with courage and vision came together and created the United States of America. They represented 13 colonies, and they met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia to speak out against injustice.
 
Another remarkable group came together in New York’s Central Plaza in February 1934 to speak out against injustice. They did not represent 13 colonies. They represented three needle trades unions: The International Ladies Garment Workers, The Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish Labor Bund, the Forward Association, and the United Hebrew Trades. They created the Jewish Labor Committee.
 
The equivalent of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were Baruch Charney Vladeck of the Forward, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, and Benjamin Gebiner of the Workmen’s Circle.
 
More than 1,000 delegates came together to make the American public, and especially the American trade union movement, aware of the injustices and the suppression of freedom growing in Nazi Germany, and threatening the rest of the world. They were sounding the alarm about Nazism, anti-Semitism, racism, and the destruction of democratic institutions. 
 
The Jewish Labor Committee was to be their vehicle for spreading the word.  The JLC had links to scores of labor and anti-fascist organizations throughout Europe, and attempted to publicize the threat that Hitler posed. Vladeck addressed the 1934 American Federation of Labor convention. The JLC created a news service informing the Jewish and labor communities of the growing threat. It organized mass meetings and initiated a boycott of Nazi goods. With the help of the AF of L, more than 1,000 visas were obtained for Jewish, labor and Socialist leaders who would have otherwise been killed by the Nazis. Through the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, it assisted anti-Nazi forces, especially the Polish underground. 
 
After World War II, the JLC continued its overseas work, organizing shipments of food and clothing to survivors in displaced persons camps, and initiated a child adoption program where local unions and Workmen’s Circle branches raised money earmarked for individual children in Europe.
 
In 1944, the JLC began its educational programs focusing on ending discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism in the workplace and throughout American society. By the 1950s, it had established Labor Committees for Civil Rights in more than a dozen cities, as part of the JLC’s regional offices.
 
I joined the national staff of the JLC in 1956, after having been an ILGWU organizer.  Over the next six years, I learned its history, and met and worked with the legendary people carrying on the work begun in 1934.  Vladeck was gone, but Dubinsky (my former boss) and Gebiner were still around. 
 
Lazar Epstein maintained overseas contacts, and Zalman Lichtenstein brought thousands of children and funders together. The Executive Secretary was Jacob Pat, assisted by Benjamin Tabachinsky, both were leaders of the Jewish Labor Bund who made it out of Poland in 1938.  
 
I was hired by Manny Muravchik, Director of the Anti-Discrimination Division, to be national field secretary, maintaining contact with our regional offices, including Julius Bernstein, the New England Regional director.  I edited Labor Reports, our monthly news service to the labor press, prepared educational materials, taught at union summer schools, addressed union conventions, and attended meetings of the National Community Relations Advisory Council (now the Jewish Council on Public Affairs--JCPA). We were recognized in the Jewish community relations field as the bridge between the organized labor movement and the organized Jewish community. 
 
We were the voice of labor to the Jewish community, and the voice of the Jewish community to labor. We transmitted the concerns of one to the other. In part, it is because of the JLC that labor has no better friend among American ethnic and religious communities than the Jews, and American Jewry has no better friend among non-Jewish organizations than organized labor.
 
These days, the JLC is still involved in building Jewish solidarity with ongoing labor struggles. We play a central role in improving working conditions for hotel workers in the Boston area; we continue to support domestic workers and educate employers of domestic workers following passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, and we are prioritizing the Fight for $15 campaign to raise the wages of low wage workers. The JLC chapter of New England, of which I am a board member, is part of the RaiseUp Massachusetts coalition of unions, interfaith and communal organizations that came together last year to successfully push through a raise in the minimum wage and earned sick time last year.
 
The JLC has been around for more than 80 years. Our membership and leadership have changed.  In the early days, we claimed that we were speaking for 500,000 Jewish trade unionists, and both our membership and leadership spoke Yiddish. It is no longer the case. However, we are still committed, as were the founding fathers of both the USA and the JLC, to fighting injustice. The fight continues.


Before joining the JLC in 1956, Jake was an organizer for the ILGWU.  After leaving the JLC, he worked for two unions, and three government agencies, and is happily retired.

By Martin Abramowitz
Reprinted from JewishBoston.com, August 21, 2015

September 7, Labor Day, is the launch of the New England Jewish Labor Committee (JLC)’s campaign to mobilize support within the Jewish community for the Fight for 15, as part of the RaiseUp Massachusetts coalition. As a member of the Boston Jewish community, and as an activist with JLC New England, I support this call for a living wage for the working people of our state and across the nation, and ask for the support of others in the Jewish community.

So what brings a 75-year-old middle-class retiree from a professional career in the Jewish community to the JLC as a volunteer activist and modest financial supporter?

In part, I'm acknowledging my 1940's roots in working-class Jewish Brooklyn, where I was the child of a labor “intermarriage": Rose sewed labels on men's ties, which made her a member of the "Amalgamated" Clothing Workers Union of America, while Isidore cut patterns for women's dresses, as a charter member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. That Isidore, at age 18, had been on site at—and lived to testify about—the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, further underscored my feeling of responsibility for the well-being of working people. I've always felt that I owe my very existence to the fact that my father survived this terrible industrial tragedy only by random luck. Working on the Fight for 15 campaign is therefore a way of honoring my parents’ memory.

The Fight for 15 is a movement to raise the wages of low wage workers and improve their working conditions, whether in food services, healthcare, car washes, airports, or in other low wage jobs. People who have full-time jobs in these sectors are unable to pay for the basics like food, rent or transportation. Shamefully, many have to apply for some form of public assistance, despite working full-time. Raising wages directly addresses income inequality, helping low wage workers attain self-sufficiency, and in the process turning recipients of public assistance into taxpayers. As part of the Fight for 15, JLC New England will be mobilizing Jewish voices to campaign for several proposed pieces of state legislation to address low wages, the most important of which is Bill S.1024, an act to establish a living wage for employees of big box retail stores and fast food chains in the Commonwealth.

Why work on this campaign—seemingly not a “Jewish issue”—through JLC? Because I am so grateful that the JLC gives me the chance to put my name behind a Jewish commitment to fairness for workers which is rooted in Jewish tradition of social justice and the values with which I was raised, and which signals to the larger community that Boston’s Jews–and America's–have not forgotten where we came from.

Yet another reason is because of the kind of organization JLC is—both effective and “haimish”. I spent the largest chunk of my work life as a planning and allocations executive at CJP, Boston's Jewish Federation. This work focusing on strategic planning, priority-setting, and the funding of local agencies and organizations was an important opportunity to have a positive impact in my community. In the course of my work with CJP, I had occasion to observe and work with a LOT of front-line Jewish organizations. JLC struck me as unique: its tightly focused mission on issues I cared deeply about—fair wages, paid sick leave, parental leave, predictable work schedules, its scrappy and non-bureaucratic culture, and the credibility it had built in the "corridors of power," and its hands-on grass-roots approach was attractive to me.

It was hard for me to believe that all that activism and energy and impact on the labor scene in Boston could be coming from an organization anchored by one professional staffer and a relatively small group of core volunteers. Given the JLC’s visibility in the State House, I was surprised that many of my colleagues, friends, and family who cared about these issues didn’t know that JLC existed and what it was doing in the community on behalf of working people. I knew that I had found a place to put my volunteer energies when I retired.

So, on Labor Day 2015, I hope that you will take the opportunity to reflect on your own family’s Jewish American story and how that has shaped your life today. The stands we take on issues of fairness in our community shape the values of our children—as Jews and as Americans. Let us be a strong, audible, Jewish voice for a fair shake for all the working people of our community.

Our legislators need to hear from us. To add your name in support of the Fight for $15, click here.

Martin Abramowitz is the former VP for Planning with the CJP, Greater Boston’s Jewish Federation. Currently, he serves as a volunteer consultant to JLC New England Board and as the CEO of Jewish Major Leaguers, Inc.

This piece is the first in a JLC New England blog series From Passion to Action.

By Corey Hope Leaffer

I am proud to be a Jew and proud to be in the labor movement. Both are important identities for me.

For the last 10 years I have worked professionally in the labor movement but I got active in worker rights when I was in college. As a child I attended Jewish day school and that is where I learned the treasures of my Jewish religion and culture. I attended Brandeis and my Jewish identity grew. After I graduated, I became a fellow at the Jewish Organizing Initiative Network (JOIN) where I worked at the North Shore Labor Council. That was an important step in bringing my Jewish values together with my commitment to the labor movement.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that I sometimes feel uncomfortable as a Jew in the labor movement. I’ve heard my fair share of anti-Semitic comments from workers. At the same time I’ve also felt uncomfortable as a union organizer in the Jewish community, especially when I’ve heard racist comments from Jews. Each time, I am challenged to figure out how to respond and how to do it as a woman who identifies as a Jewish organizer. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a quiet or fearful person but I am an organizer and I’ve learned that listening, building a respectful relationship and timing are all very important factors in dealing with difficult situations.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about new difficult situations I will soon be challenged with in life. In a few weeks, I will become a mother for the first time. My fiancée Zev and I are expecting a son any day now. Zev is black and Jewish and I am white and Jewish and we are both union organizers for SEIU. Our son will be multi-racial and he’ll be Jewish and he’ll grow up with his parents working in the labor movement. He will be born into a complicated world with a complicated and beautiful history from both sides of his heritage.

I want us to be a Jewish family that fights racism and anti-Semitism, for worker rights, for queer rights, and for other progressive values we are passionate about. I also want to listen to my son, to have a respectful relationship with him, and to figure out the right time to start helping him figure out who he is and what he believes in. I recognize that I’m approaching parenting in the same way I’d approach a campaign – as an organizer. In truth, I don’t know any better way.

I will look to the Jewish and Labor communities for examples of how to navigate the tricky terrain of raising a black Jewish son with values that Zev and I are fighting for. I’m hoping each of you will help us by challenging anti-Semitism in the labor community and racism in the Jewish community, so our son can find many places where he knows he is welcomed and respected for all the different parts of himself.

The best place that I have been able to bring together both sides of my identity is the Jewish Labor Committee. It is through this community and the leaders I’ve met here that I’ve been able connect my daily work to my religious beliefs. I hope my son finds a community like I have at the JLC a lot earlier in life. I hope I can find ways to help connect him to other Jews of color being raised to think about the world they live in and how to make it a better place.

If at any time I fear that he is not developing some of my same values, the first place I’ll go for guidance is my community at the Jewish Labor Committee, to learn from my sisters and brothers about how to run a campaign to get him back on track.

Corey Hope Leaffer is the new Organizing Coordinator at 1199SEIU - United Healthcare Workers East MA Division, and a former Jewish Organizing Initiative Fellow.  She lives in Jamaica Plain with her fiancée Zev and their dog Hawthorne. 

By Mark Erlich

I have been a union carpenter for nearly 40 years, an activist all my life, and am currently the head of the 19,000 member New England Regional Council of Carpenters (NERCC). I am also the grandson of Henryk Erlich, leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a potent political and social force in Eastern Europe and Russia between World War I and World War II. My grandmother, Sophie Dubnow Erlich, was a poet and activist in her own right, particularly in pre-revolutionary Russia. My personal commitment to social and economic justice is rooted in my family’s secular Jewish heritage – not as a product of nostalgia for the old days, but as an understanding that those traditions are just as relevant today.

Our labor movement now represents just 11% of the nation’s workforce, down from a peak of 35% during the 1950s. There are a host of reasons – de-industrialization, globalization, automation, the business community’s ideological attack on labor, the recession era budget crisis-fueled assault on public sector unions, and our own internal shortcomings. The result is that unions, created as a necessary counter-balance to corporate power, have slowly but steadily lost ground to an unyielding and increasingly sophisticated 21st century version of global capitalism.

Simultaneously, social and cultural trends elevate the value of individualism and diminish notions of collective solidarity. The paternalistic concept of employer responsibility for the health care and retirement security of long term employees is vanishing. The workforce is fractured from a growing system of subcontracting that eliminates large payrolls as a do-your-own-thing version of entrepreneurialism is celebrated as innovative and modern. Unions are often described as, at best, a vestige of a no longer relevant past and, at worst, an obstacle to job creation and growth in the new information economy.

More and more observers are finally recognizing that the consequence of these trends is the growth of economic inequality. But what is rarely articulated is that the growth of inequality coincides with the decline of union density. Since 1967, the decline of the middle class share of national income is almost completely correlated with the decline of union representation. Unions built the middle class in the US. Now, as unions have faded, the middle class is disappearing.

We need to acknowledge simple math. Nationwide, we do not represent 89% of the workforce and an even higher percentage of private sector workers. We do not dictate the terms of employment. We are reacting to terms that are being imposed by non-union market forces.

That harsh reality requires that union campaigns frame their message in ways that speak to and for the entire workforce, not just our current members. In my work, we rarely make public appeals for a project to be built with union workers simply because “building union” is better. Even though our members work on roughly 60% of the projects (measured in dollar volume) in New England, there is little public sympathy for the idea that union tradesworkers are “entitled” to work on a particular project. Therefore, we try to represent all carpenters – union and non-union, documented and undocumented.  NERCC organizers spend their time talking to non-union carpenters, advocating for them with their employers or with state and federal agencies in case of underpayments, employee misclassification, wage theft and wage fraud. We do it because people deserve to get paid for their work, pure and simple. But we also do it because it elevates standards across the industry and allows unionized firms to be able to compete on a more level playing field. It’s the right thing to do and it’s in our self interest.

As a house of labor, we need to speak on behalf of all workers whether or not they are in a union. We need to expand our idea of who our constituency is. Public sector unions, in particular have to alter the current terms of debate. They have to speak to the consumers of their services and to taxpayers, in addition to their own members. Private sector unions like mine face a similar tension between accountability to dues-paying members and sensitivities to the communities where we build and the owners we build for. We have to argue that unions can bring value to our particular industries.

I also think soul-searching in the labor movement has to extend to our structures. Do they work or are they barriers to developing a brand of unionism that is more relevant? Can we succeed without a centralization of human and financial assets that can take on the resources and sophistication of the modern business world?

We are now on the losing end of class warfare, and when a war goes awry, thoughtful leaders seek alternative paths. As the military strategist (and possible Jewish mystic?) Sun Tzu said, “in a country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies. Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions.”

We need friends such as the New England Jewish Labor Committee and many more. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I believe that unions are more relevant and necessary than ever. I believe that the single clearest road to restoring some level of economic inequality to our society is to grow the labor movement. However, I also believe that will require a brand of unionism that embraces allies and speaks on behalf of all working Americans.

Mark Erlich is the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters and a frequent writer on labor and political issues.