As a visible Jew in the union movement, I was embraced

When I put on my kippah the morning that I started my internship at the Australian Workers' Union (AWU) in Granville, I hesitated. How many people walk around Sydney’s Western Suburbs wearing a kippah? Would my visibly Jewish identity feel out of place in a union office?

But from the moment I arrived, I was embraced. Within days, I was asked if I kept Shabbat and needed to leave early on Friday. After the horrifying weekend of antisemitic incidents in early February, several people in the office checked in on me, even offering to walk with me at lunch in case I felt unsafe walking alone around Granville’s crowded streets.

One afternoon, while sifting through old editions of the AWU’s historic newspaper, The Worker, I stumbled upon a 1967 article about unionism in Israel. The article featured the work of the Histadrut, reflecting on what the Australian union movement could learn from Israel’s successes surrounding WH&S protections.

Evidently, the Jewish experience exists in the consciousness of the union movement. Yet unionism is rarely the subject of conversations around the Shabbat table despite workers’ rights being a significant theme in Jewish law: “Do not oppress the hired labourer… Give him his wages in the daytime, and do not let the sun set on him, for he is poor, and his life depends on them, lest he cry out to God about you, for this will be counted as a sin for you (Deuteronomy 24:14-5).

The union’s work is to bring these ancient ideals to life. Admittedly, however, this is not a view I always held so passionately. Before I started the internship, my awareness of unions was mostly limited to the strikes I read about in the news and the Marxist theory I studied at university.

But from day one, I quickly saw that their work is about far more: fair wages, health and safety, legal advocacy, job security, systemic reform, and more.

Thrown straight into the deep end, I quickly saw just how essential unions remain in Australia today - for both collective bargaining and for confronting daily workplace injustices. While working on a submission for a parliamentary modern slavery inquiry, I heard countless stories of migrant workers on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme being underpaid, denied superannuation, crammed into shipping containers for housing, and sent back to their home countries if they ever fell sick. One day, we received a photo of a PALM worker with a deep head wound - his employer had refused to let him go to the hospital, forcing him to keep working instead.

Another time, I remember arriving in the morning to an extremely intense atmosphere in the office. Union organisers were urgently discussing how to advise their members after the workers discovered that emergency oxygen supplies in their tunnelling project had not been replenished for six months and that no one on shift was trained in emergency procedures.

One of the most unexpected lessons of my internship came when I joined a delegation of timber workers to the NSW Parliament. As an environmentalist, I never imagined I would find myself advocating alongside industry leaders from the timber sector. But speaking with union delegates from ‘timber towns’ quickly opened my eyes to how well-intentioned environmental policies can inadvertently devastate entire communities where the timber industry is the primary source of employment.

Unlike many lobby groups that simply oppose new regulations, the union put forward a solution designed to protect both jobs and government sustainability initiatives. Their creative pragmatism challenged me to see advocacy beyond rigid binaries of right and wrong, demonstrating how meaningful change requires both bold vision and workable policy solutions.

So what led me, a young Jewish educator, to spend three weeks interning at the AWU in the first place? Initially, it was about exploring work outside of the Jewish world. As someone deeply passionate about social justice, I was eager to see how advocacy and positive change unfold in a professional setting.

However, through the internship, I also came to realise just how deeply the Jewish tradition is interconnected with unionism, and how much our community can learn from the labour movement.

In Jewish institutions, our main work is that of community building. Similarly, I imagine a professional unionist would identify the core business of a union as organising - building up union membership and strengthening the capacity of its members to assert their individual and collective interests. While organising exists in various forms across the Jewish community, unions dedicate entire roles to it, prioritising organising as both a tactic and a central pillar of their movement and organisational structure.

As I had the opportunity to experience, organisers spend their days travelling to meet their members where they are (physically and metaphorically) - grabbing coffee, having a whinge about the boss, and genuinely listening to concerns about work.

They bring people with shared needs together, helping to restore a sense of agency in those who have been disenfranchised by inspiring a deep sense of collective responsibility. One relationship at a time, the union becomes stronger. So, too, can the Jewish community learn from this approach.

Avishair Conyer was a recipient of the Andrew Casey Memorial Internship, supported by The Jewish Independent.