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.