We Are Moving On To Victory, With Hope and Dignity (Seeger Singing). New York State’s 200,000 domestic workers are moving toward a significant legislative victory. Domestic Workers United, an organization of thousands of nannies, housekeepers and elder care workers, went going to Albany Tuesday February 10, 2009 to lobby for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. I went with. Update Post Jump.

These workers, largely immigrant women of color, are not “employees” for most purposes under New York State’s Labor Law. Their Bill of Rights will put that right. In 2008, the bill, A01470, gained more than 60 supporters in the NYS Assembly. Sponsored by Keith Wright (and co-sponsored by among other, my Assembly Member Brian Kavanaugh) the bill was acted on favorably by the Assembly Labor Committee (25-1). The Bill of Rights has gotten major support from the NYC Central Labor Council, from AFL-CIO President John Sweeny, Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith (as an individual) and progressive organizations (eg: Jews For Racial & Economic Justice and CODA, the Lower East Side Political Organization).

You can help without going to icy Albany.  read more »

Purim, the Feast of Lots, the silliest of Jewish holidays is coming Thursday & Friday March 20th & 21st . It’s a raucous, drunken party holiday with costumes and funny plays. You don’t have to be Jewish to celebrate it. For non-observant people, here’s how.

Update? How can there be an update on a holiday thousands of years old? It's not. It's about the Purim party this Saturday far after the jump.

Purim celebrates a fabled victory of Jews over their enemies in Persia thousands of years ago and follows the time honored tradition: They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s Eat. For the full story, people read the whole Megillah – the scroll in which the Biblical Book of Esther is written. This is not really much a religious holiday. God appears not at all in the story which is an entirely human tale of struggle.

A bare-bones plot summary via Wikipedia:  read more »

Tuesday’s paean in praise of Jacob Riis’ photography (google images of his work here , wiki article here)and 1880’s discovery of How The Other Half Lives, was given contemporary life by the report of NYS’s Labor Department which has discovered that employers are unlawfully exploiting their workers by not paying them, by paying less than minimum wage, by not paying disability and unemployment compensation etc. Ms.M. Patricia Smith, the Labor Commissioner, who set a bold course as chief of the AG’s Labor Bureau, continues to light fires. “I wouldn’t doubt that 10 percent of the state’s workers are either misclassified as independent contractors or work off the books,” Ms. Smith said. (Jonathon Tasini’s take here )

I see illegal employment everywhere: construction workers, off-the-books domestic workers, delivery people and supermarket baggers. They are working without fair pay in every neighborhood. Have you ever seen any? Will it come as a shock to you that many of those victimized are men and women of color?  read more »

Victor Rabinowitz long time advocate on behalf of union labor, civil rights for minorities and civil liberties for dissenters, who represented Cuba, Alger Hiss and Benjamin Spock and who died in late November, will be remembered and honored at a memorial meeting Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 4PM at NYU Law School’s Vanderbuilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South. To read a moving personal memoir of Rabinowitz by one of his children, Mark Rabinowitz, click here

UPDATE: He's still dead, but for New Yorkers of a certain age and left persuasion, the meeting memorializing the life of Victor Rabinowitz was a time warp. Civil rights, civil liberties activists, war opponents, now grey-haired litigators some turned judges and law professors all looked much as they did when I first met many of them in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Chuck McDew, the first chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee looked more wrinkled and greyer (but no heavier) than he did in 1962, but he was just as warm and funny as then as he remembered how “Miss Ella” (Baker) sent him to meet “good white people:” Victor and his partner Leonard Boudin. Joni, Mark & Peter Rabinowitz remembered their father’s loyalty, devotion and humor as well as a few of his difficult moments. Some of the speeches were dull with left-speak, of course, but the real remembering of Victor Rabinowitz took place as we schmoozed before and after, reaffirming links between us forged in struggles which (for me at least) were quite frightening. His was quite a time.

But you can do more. Following the memorial meeting, a few steps East at Judson Memorial Church 55 Washington Square South the, Domestic Workers United , an organization of largely immigrant women of color, is hosting a benefit dinner dance 6-11:30PM. It will feature home cooking. I’ve eaten their food and it’s wonderful.  read more »