In Hebrew, the word “Avodah” means “work”, “service”, or “labor”. Its many meanings reflect our organization’s mission to seek economic justice within the communities we live.  

Many Avodah alumni have sought to continue working for economic justice by organizing in the labor movement.

We are proud to be a unionized organization, and to be a part of the rich history of to Jewish union organizers and labor advocates that have fought for workers’ rights in the United States.

On this Labor Day, Avodah celebrates the many Avodahniks who are organizing within the labor movement. Here are stories from just a few who are helping build worker power.

I work on the communications team at the PSC-CUNY, which is the union that represents faculty and staff at CUNY. We have about 30,000 members who work on CUNY campuses and office locations across New York City. 

What kinds of campaigns is your union working on right now?
We’re currently in the midst of the back to school rush with many of our members who are faculty starting up again, and those of our members who have worked all summer dealing with busier schedules.

So everything’s been ramping up a bit. Right now, the biggest energy is around our contract fight. We’ve been negotiating with the CUNY administration for over a year, and our members have been working under an expired contract for a year and a half. So our bargaining team is working really hard to try to push a new contract over the finish line.

I’m also working on a series of town halls focused on decarbonizing CUNY. That’s an initiative of our member-led environmental justice working group. I’m supporting them with logistics, communications and press support to just try to get more eyeballs on this amazing organizing that they’ve been doing for a while.

Why did you seek employment in a union after doing Avodah?
Avodah gave me a really strong window into how nonprofits work, both from my own experience in my placement and also from all my roommates and fellow Corps Members’ experiences. I found parts of that work really meaningful, but I also found nonprofits to be really frustrating in a lot of ways as a vehicle for achieving social change.

Nonprofits, just based on their funding structure, are really beholden in a lot of ways to the systems that also necessitate them. I had some familiarity with the labor movement on an academic level before I did Avodah. And my first hand experience with the nonprofit industrial complex really pushed me in that direction as a way to really directly serve and help people, but also do so as part of a broader project for building power within those communities, and not just addressing the most visible manifestations of their problems.

Why are you excited to be part of the labor movement?
I am super excited to be part of the labor movement because I see it as the best vehicle for achieving broad social change. There are so many different things in our society that we need to improve, and my work in Avodah exposed me to some of those raw edges of social failures. 

My work in labor is both about addressing those symptoms, but also about building a project for power and for changing society. I think that workers organizing as workers is the way to maximize  popular influence over what happens in our country, and in the world. 

I’m really proud to be part of a fighting social justice union that sees our workplace issues as really intimately connected with the issues that, in our case, our students and our community members also face. Organizing workers is the most promising form of political work happening in the United States today.

I started in 2014 at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. I was inspired by a program I did with Jews United for Justice in DC, where I learned that the progressive movement, the movement for working people, was aligned with unions.

That was not something I had ever known before, even when I got involved in Occupy Wall Street, and I don’t think there was a super prominent labor component to that. I was a business major, and learned about corporate responsibility, or lack thereof. It was very consumer focused and environment focused, but not super based on an understanding of the workers that were employed by those companies.

So I started at the UFCW in the research department, working on the meatpacking side, which was very gruesome. After that I moved to New York to work for the Directors Guild and I was there for five and a half years. And now I’m at the Writers Guild of America-East.

What campaigns have you helped organize?
Last summer, as you know, writers working for the Hollywood studios went on strike. They were fighting for a variety of different things, but one of the biggest factors was the change in the industry away from linear television and towards a streaming model that undercut a lot of the employment practices that writers had won in the last 80 years.

So slowly over time those rights and standards and working conditions had eroded. Writers found themselves without all of the protections they had previously won because the studios used the new model and the new distribution methods as an excuse to roll back the middle class living that the writers had fought for and had achieved.

That was a big driving force behind all of the demands the writers made, not to mention AI protections, and making sure that their work is protected going into the future to make sure that whatever models the companies will adopt contemplated the need for writers to earn a livelihood.

Another one was earlier this year, we had contract negotiations with Sesame Workshop for the writers of Sesame Street. And they came to us concerned that a lot of the new shows that the company was producing were animated and the company was using that as an excuse to pay below union standards and hire non-union writers and exclude them from pension and health plans. The writers felt a deep sense of injustice over this change.

And so we won union protections for animation writers for the first time in any WGA contract. It was historic and those writers worked really hard and  pulled out all the stops, to make sure that the company knew that they were serious about winning their demands.

How has your experience at Avodah influenced your work?

I did the Avodah Fellowship 2017-2018, and I learned a lot. It helped ground me and understand better my sense of the role of Jewish Americans in the social justice struggle. It helped me realize that internalized oppressions affect us, and being conscious of that as we go through the work that we do and the ways that we’re projecting those normalized stereotypes, even about our own identities, so hopefully we can challenge it.

I learned to generally be aware of how those systems are playing within ourselves as we interact with others, either of marginalized identities or just people who are working, people trying to make a living.

It also helped me develop a community in New York City of Jews with the same grappling with the same questions and issues that I was. I learned a lot more about what other people were working on and other movements that hadn’t been exposed to a ton on my own and in my own experience. It was a really good network for me.

I actually was impressed because Avodah was willing to make space for really difficult conversations about Israel-Palestine in our group.

What would you say to someone interested in working within the labor movement?

You should see yourself as a cog in a machine. As unexciting as that sounds, you’re not there to be some self aggrandizing labor hero. You’re there to serve the workers in whatever way you can best do that, and to serve the movement in whatever way you can best do that.

If you have that mindset of wanting to contribute in the way that best helps the workers, that you’re there to help, that will really serve you. Just try to keep your ego separate from the work that you’re doing. And I’m saying this as someone who really wants to win.

That being said, I would add that it’s also really important to find pleasure and moments of joy in the small wins. You’re not going to survive if you’re just sacrificing your whole self. It’s important to balance finding things that can give you energy and move you forward to keep contributing to that service.

I’m a union side labor lawyer. I’ve been practicing for almost a decade. I got interested in labor during law school, at Berkeley and sort of fell in with the labor crowd there. I joined the workers rights clinic, the employment labor law journal, became friends with people who had been in unions or union organizers, or had grown up in union families.  I learned more about labor, the power of workers coming together, to advocate for themselves and their working conditions. 

Over the course of my career I’ve worked at two different union-side labor law firms, where we represented largely public sector unions made up of workers for the state, the county, schools, park districts, and cities.

About three years ago, I went in house at a union and am now a staff attorney, at SEIU local 73 in Chicago. We represent around 35,000 public sector and some private sector workers in Illinois and northwest Indiana. 

I really enjoy getting to work with the members and the staff more closely and being part of the larger vision and strategy of the local. The local itself is advocating for workers on all levels, including political levels. They helped get Brandon Johnson elected mayor and advocate for policies that help working people, even outside of the agreements that we negotiate for folks.

What’s a recent campaign you worked on? 

I helped out on our most recent contract negotiations with JUF Chicago and the local affiliates at JCC, JCFS, CJE. I was part of the bargaining team, and did a mix of legal work and organizing work to help workers make really big gains in the contract. 

It started with a decent contract, but there were a lot of areas where there was significant need for improvement, especially around wages, wage progression, and fairness. 

We managed to get huge raises for folks anywhere from 5% to like some 30, 40%.  This includes folks who had been there for like 20 years; JCC teachers who hadn’t gotten decent raises in a while, caught up with inflation and addressed issues of workload and fairness. 

I was really impressed and inspired by all the workers. We grounded our organizing in Jewish values. We had help from Jewish community members, including Aryeh Bernstein from Avodah, who helped us organize getting rabbis to sign on to a letter to JUF in support of our ask for a fair contract. 

I was really proud of the contract we got and I’m excited for the next time we’re able to fight for an even better contract. 

How did the Justice Fellowship connect to your labor movement work? 

I really enjoyed participating in the Justice Fellowship and I think being sort of a person who has experience working and in different movement spaces was really helpful.

Being part of the justice fellowship was great because I got to meet people like in other areas of social justice,  people working in different spaces. We’re often in kind of silos and that was really nice to connect with folks doing great work, but that I just didn’t know about.

It was also really fascinating to connect the work to our Jewish values from a philosophical perspective and then from a historical perspective. I really enjoyed that aspect of it and learned a lot from Aryeh Bernstein, the readings, and the presenters.

I enjoyed creating this community of people who care about social justice and wanting to see how our Judaism fits into that.

What excites you about being involved in this labor movement? 

I am excited and committed to the labor movement because I think it’s one of the biggest forces for change and good in the United States.

It’s one of the few spaces where people from all different backgrounds come together and engage in solidarity, where it’s not just me for me, it’s me for all of us.

I think just the changes that folks can make in their lives more broadly, often come from work. Work is where we spend a lot of our lives and our time and where we get a lot of our dignity from, for better or for worse. The labor movement really empowers people of all class backgrounds, races, and religions, to stand up for themselves and for their coworkers, to have more dignity at work, to have better living and working conditions and benefits.

 I really feel honored to be part of that movement, even just a tiny little part of it, and feel like I’m doing something helpful to the world.