The Bible Commands: Solidarity Forever ✊

The One With The Labor Justice Torah

This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re generally working our way through Leviticus these days. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.🌱

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Hi hi hi!! Remember how we’re in the middle of the middle of the Torah now—Leviticus 19? The Holiness Code. The heart of the Torah. Literally getting to the core stuff, if you will.

Aaand what’s one of the key messages Torah wants to make sure that we hear?

You shall not defraud your neighbor, nor rob them; the wages of a laborer shall not remain with you all night until the morning. (Leviticus.19.13)

Because of course labor justice is part of Torah, and of later Jewish law. Of all the absolute no-brainers for anyone who claims to be serving a deity that embodies love in any way? Like.

There’s a similar verse in Deuteronomy with the inverse language:

You shall not defraud a poor and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land.You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is poor and urgently depends on it (Deuteronomy 24:14-15)

Note that Deuteronomy makes both the logic of the commandment clear, and also articulates that both Israelite (lit. “your sibling”/ach) or a non-Israelite living in the community (“your non-citizen/alien/ger”)—the idea that you also had to treat nationalistic “others” with justice and dignity was a very radical idea indeed in the ancient Near East.

The word in Leviticus is more ambiguous—(”companion/comrade/fellow”/re’eah.). There are scholarly debates about whether it means “only Israelites” or “everybody,” but taken together the meaning of these verses is without ambiguity.

In any case, there’s a little debate in medieval sources about whether they have to pay the worker immediately at the end of their shift or whether the employer has a 12 hour grace period to get the funds together or what, but the bottom line is clear:

Whoever withholds an employee’s wages, it is as though they have taken the person’s life from them. (Bava Metzia 112a)

The sources go after this principle, in different ways, again and again.

For example: You can’t make workers take their work out in trade if they haven’t agreed to it.

If one hires a worker to work with straw and hay, and then the worker says, “Give me my wages” and the employer says, “take what you have done (namely, the straw and hay) as your wages,” we do not listen [to the employer] (Mishnah Bava Metzia 10:5)

And The Midrash (Sifra, Leviticus 86; Midrash Hagadol, Leviticus 25:39) explains that the verse:

Do not rule over [a servant] with rigor; but fear your God. (Leviticus 25:43)

means that one is not permitted to make a servant engage in degrading work, perform work that has no purpose (i.e., "busy" work), or carry out a task without a defined limit (e.g., "hoe until I return" when it’s unclear when the person’s coming back.)

And indeed, when one of the wealthier rabbis—a wine trader—tried to be petty and collect for damages incurred on the job—his colleagues ensured that his workers were not only not held liable, but that they were paid for their labor nonetheless:

Some porters working for Raba bar bar Hanan broke a jug of wine. He seized their clothes. They came before Rav, and Rav said to Raba bar bar Hanan, “Give them their clothing.” Raba bar bar Hanan said to him, “Is this the law?” Rav said, “Yes, because of the principle ‘You should walk in the ways of the good,’ (Proverbs 2:20).” He gave them back their clothes. They said to him, “We are poor, and we troubled ourselves to work all day and we are needy—do we receive nothing?” Immediately Rav said to Raba bar bar Hanan, “Go, give them their wages.” He said to Rav, “Is this the law?” Rav said, “Yes—‘you should keep the ways of the righteous’ (Proverbs 2:20).” (Bava Metzia 83a)

And this idea about employers’ obligations transcending the letter of the law was heard through the centuries:

Rabbi Saul Berman taught:

There is an apocryphal tale told about Rabbi Israel Salanter, the [19th. C. Lithuanian] founder of Judaism’s Mussar [ethics] movement. Every year before [Passover], Rabbi Salanter would inspect matzah bakeries to check their kashrut/kosher status. One confident owner couldn’t wait to show off how efficient his matzah production had become. When Rabbi Salanter finished the inspection, though, he declared that the bakery was in violation of the halakhic/Jewish legal prohibition against blood in food. “Your sense of efficiency, together with the unacceptable demands placed upon your workers, shows that their blood is mixed into the food produced in this bakery,” he said. Even though the blood was purely metaphoric, Rabbi Salanter would not certify the kashrut of the matzah.

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There’s also the whole thing about how Shabbat is the first labor law in history. Remember? Rest matters.

On May 1, 1886, 80,000 people marched down Michigan Avenue in Chicago in what is considered the first modern May Day Parade, with the slogan "Eight-hour day with no cut in pay." Over the next few days, over 350k factory workers across the country went on strike, some winning the 8 hour workday almost immediately, some… not. The fight took some time to win in earnest. The Haymarket Massacre happened in Chicago just days later, related to these protests for a work day that lasted only 8 hours long.

Second Century Rabbis Say Union Yes

The Tosefta was an oral tradition that was compiled around the same time as the Mishnah, around the late 2nd century or so—and even then, we were already clear about the right of workers to organize—as well as the obligations of unions to protect their members, within reason:

The wool workers and the dyers are permitted to say, "We will all be partners in any business that comes to the city."

The bakers are permitted to establish work shifts amongst themselves. Donkey drivers are permitted to say, "We will provide another donkey for anyone whose donkey dies." If it dies through negligence, they do not need to provide a new one; if not through negligence, they do need to provide him with another donkey. And if he says, "Give me the money, and I will purchase one myself," they should not listen to him, but should buy a donkey and give it to him.

Merchants are permitted to say, "We will provide another ship for anyone whose ship is destroyed." If it is destroyed through negligence, they do not need to provide another one; if it is not destroyed through negligence, they do need to provide another. And if he departs for a place to which people do not go, they do not need to provide him with another ship. (Tosefta Bava Metzia 11:24-26)

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Donkey driver in Fez, Morocco. Better take care of that beast if you want the union to cover it, my friend!

And back over here in the late capitalist wasteland, it’s sure looking like it’s Union O’Clock. 🔥

Things are moving.

According to federal data, the 2022 membership increase in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was QUADRUPLE that of the membership increase in 2021. (Starbucks baristas accounted for more than two-thirds of that.) The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) also more than doubled their election wins (and thus membership).

And there have been some major recent wins in traditional sectors—earlier this spring, for example, Los Angeles Public School workers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, including a wage increase of 30% and retroactive pay.

The historic win organizing Amazon Staten Island and opening the door for other organizing at Amazon, including some drivers in California organizing through Teamsters and workers in Great Britain striking for better conditions. And the implications of this kind of organizing for an entire generation of workers is massive—as Amazon and Starbucks, with the millions each pours into union-busting—well-knows.

And we’re seeing an uptick in unionization of the types of workers that haven’t traditionally organized in large numbers—like professors and grad students, publishing professionals, librarians, health care workers, principals, museum employees, etc. (The New York Times just scored significant win.)

And, of course, the Writer’s Guild of America is striking now, demanding to be treated with respect with regards to pay, job stability and residuals in this new streaming world. Solidarity, friends. (This is, of course, not new for them—their last strike was 15 years ago, right as streaming was starting to become A Thing.)

Scenes from the WGA Strike

Some of the possibilities of this New Labor Movement have been expanded due to the Biden Administration’s guidelines, issued in the fall of 2022, around how independent contractors are defined—an attempt to curtail the exploitation of the gig economy. An employee has to meet a certain number of criteria to truly be an “independent contractor”—otherwise, they’re a real employees, and are as such legally entitled to a number of workplace protections—and enjoy workplace rights, such as the right to unionize.

But even before this, much of this organizing work had already been underway.

And from a Jewish perspective, this is a wonderful thing, indeed.

Rabbi Ben Zion Chai Uziel was born in Jerusalem in 1880 and became the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of first British Mandatory Palestine in 1939, and of Israel from 1948 until his death in 1953. In one place, he wrote:

In order that the individual worker not be left on his own, to the point that they hires themselves out for a low wage in order to satisfy his hunger and that of his family with a bit of bread and water and with a dark and dingy home….the law gave [the worker] the legal right to organize….

We don’t leave people on their own, so desperate that they willingly exploit themselves based on the whims of the market!

(I mean, we do, in this society today. But this is not what should happen. These are not our values.)

Rather, as Rav Kook suggested, unions have an element of the holiness to them. (He lived at around the same time as Rabbi Ben Zion Chai Uziel, and was the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine.):

Within the workers' organization, which is formed for the purpose of guarding and protecting the work conditions, there is an aspect of righteousness and uprightness and tikkun olam (repairing the world). The workers' organization may sue both the employer and the worker who causes this [problem], for unorganized labor brings damage and loss of money to workers. For the unorganized worker works under worse conditions, both in regard to wages and in regard to working hours, etc. And this is likely to make working conditions worse in general.

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Given all of this, perhaps it’s unsurprising that Jews were on the forefront of the labor movement of early 20th c. America.

(I mentioned this at Purim, but there was so much going on there, and this is so important, that I’ll repeat it:)

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1) The socialist/communist ideas brewing in late 19th c. Russia spread both all over Eastern Europe by way of Yiddish—a language common to Jews across a wide geographical range—as well as 2) to the US. In fact, all those Commie Pinko ideas (like that “workers” should have “rights”) managed to get past the censors precisely because they were written in a language indecipherable to the gatekeepers—and, as such, spread among Jews in the US (and, of course, many Jews arriving from Eastern Europe also just… brought them along.) All this, in turn, had a significant impact on Jews’ outsized role in the early labor organizing movement.

So basically: the fact that Jews across Eastern Europe had a common language—one that was written in characters that non-Jews couldn’t read—was a key factor in US labor history. Maybe someday I’ll get over this.

And here we need to give some specific snaps to Jewish women, even before the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy and its organizing aftermath. See, eg, this, from Pauline Newman’s unpublished memoir about the 1909 garment workers’ strike. She writes that during a packed mass meeting of the shirt waist makers, featuring prominent speakers like Samuel Gompers, the (Jewish) President of the American Federation of Labor (and regarded as one of the architects of the modern labor movement).

In the midst of all the admirable speeches a girl worker, Clara Lemlich by name, got up and shouted, “Mr. Chairman, we are tired of listening to speeches. I move that we go on strike now!” and other workers got up and said “We are starving while we work, we may as well starve while we strike.” Pendimonium [sic] broke lose [sic] in the hall. Shouts, cheering, applause, confusion and shouting of “strike, strike” was heard not only in the hall but outside as well. …On this day young women laid the foundation for the powerful, constructive and influential union in the American Labor Movement, the ILGWU. As women they never did get the credit for what they contributed to the building of the present structure known all over the world as the most progressive labor organization in existence.

Clara Lemlich Shavelson, 1886–1982

As such, sometimes we’ve really gotten the memo about solidarity.

(Sometimes.)

In 1965, a predominantly Filipino-led labor organization (the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC)) declared a strike to fight the exploitation of table grape growers in Delano, California. The strike lasted 5 years.

In 1968, the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis passed a resolution in “urging all congregations to consider California table grapes to be unfit for use in synagogues and in religious Jewish homes.” This was a radical understanding kashrut—after all, grapes are not ever technically not-kosher, they’re fruit of the vine. But, like Rabbi Salanter, the MBR recognized that “kosher” was about more than technicalities. We can’t serve the divine by exploiting humans.

In 1969, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) also passed a resolution on “Farm Workers and the Grape Strike,” writing,  

These grape pickers, among the poorest working people in our land of plenty, have appealed to the conscience of the country to support them in their desperate struggle to secure a collective bargaining agreement with the growers of table grapes. We cannot stay indifferent to their appeal, nor to the right of other farm workers to a fair share of the fruit of their labors.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein was an Orthodox rabbi at one of the US’ largest Orthodox synagogues in 1971 when he endorsed Cesar Chavez's fight for farm worker rights, and told his congregants to boycott nonunion lettuce because, he said, lettuce produced "under exploitative conditions" should be regarded as nonkosher. 

(When R. Lookstein was president of the New York Board of Rabbis, he was also the force behind a resolution urging "all rabbis and their congregants" to boycott nonunion grapes.)

Of course, humans are humans, and the feminist artist Jenny Holzer was correct when she wrote that “abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Certainly there are plenty of Jews, as other people, who have sadly failed to surprise us. This unfortunately goes without saying.

Nonetheless, the Jewish labor movement and Jewish solidarity continues, from T’ruah’s work on the Fair Food Program to Jews United for Justice’s coalition work on the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and beyond. Because the work continues.

So let’s end this missive by being useful, eh?

There are three key bills up right now that need our support.

• The FAMILY Act would provide twelve weeks of job-protected paid time off for employees of any company to take care of their children, spouses, parents, — and themselves.

• The Healthy Families Act would allow workers at companies with 15 or more employees to earn up to seven paid sick days each year

• The Paycheck Fairness Act would update the Equal Pay Act so that women—especially BIPOC women—finally get paid equitably.

Click each of these buttons to send off easy-peasy notes to your elected reps!

That was easy, right? (You did all three, right?)

(Good. Thank you. So many workers thank you, too.)

Rabbi Eliezer said:

"Other people’s dignity should be as precious to you as your own." 

(Pirkei Avot/Sayings of the Sages 2:10)

(More cool extra things:)

• YIVO Archive has some good labor stuff in there somewhere, and a class coming up on Jews in the schmatte (rag, aka clothing) business, including on the labor side.

• Ethical certification for kosher food—did you treat your workers well?

  • The Tav haYosher in the US and the (now defunct, I think???) Tav Chevrati in Israel were about telling you who was a Good Boss.

• The Jewish Guide to Fair Trade

• Buy Jewish Fair Trade products through T’ruah

• Kosher meat: one and two

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💖 Sending a big pile of blessings and goodness your way. 💖

1. I’ve also heard this same story told about Rav Simcha Bunim. Was Salanter teaching Rav Simcha Bunim? I’m not clear.

2. And in the 12th c., Maimonides also comes out clearly in favor of union organizing:

Similarly, craftsmen in a specific profession may establish provisions and agree that one should not work on the day on which another is working or the like, and that anyone who violates these guidelines will be punished in such and such a fashion. (Maimonides Mishneh Torah, Sales 14:10)

(This gets extended in the Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 231:28).

3. Here’s the article by Julia Métraux that connects all the dots beautifully.