New York's Undocumented (Polish) Day Laborers

Village Voice ^ | July 25, 2001 | Michael Kamber

[Inyokern]

New York's Undocumented Day Laborers Fight for Their Piece of the Big Apple
On the Corner
Text and photographs by Michael Kamber

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Polish cleaning women wait to be hired by Satmar Jews.

Wordlessly, the negotiation has already begun. The Jewish woman, a member of the ultra-orthodox Satmar sect, looks tentatively at the Polish woman, approaches her uncertainly. The Polish woman ignores her, but monitors her advance out of the corner of her eye. The Polish woman has mouths to feed in her country. The Satmar woman needs her house cleaned. They come to do business on Williamsburg's south side, on the corner of Hooper and Lee.

"You busy, busy? You want to work?" asks the Satmar woman, looking a bit forlorn in her housedress, slippers, and wig.

The question begets a question: "How many hours?" asks Teresa, the Polish woman.

"Four, maybe five."

"How much you pay?"

"Seven."

"No, I charge eight."

"I pay seven, my regular woman is sick today."

"Bye," says Teresa, turning her back.

The Satmar woman works her way through the crowd of Polish women, but other potential employers are arriving: housewives, husbands in long black coats, even young girls—children, really—proffering scraps of paper with their grandmother's address. Demand is high today—the Sabbath begins at sundown; the local housewives have shopping to do, dinner to cook, numerous young children to care for, and a house that needs to be cleaned. Those who wait too long will have to settle for one of the brown-skinned women who stand near the light pole, speaking Spanish, or even Marie, the Haitian woman who sits by herself on a milk crate and is always the last one chosen.

The Jewish woman works her way back to Teresa, "OK. Eight," she says. "I pay eight." "No, I change my mind," says Teresa, and turns her back again, leaving the woman staring at her platinum-blond dye job, a stunned look on her face. Loud enough for the Satmar woman to hear, Teresa says, "She tell me four to five hours, that means three and a half. And she's a liar; I see it. I finish and she pays me seven, then we fight. You like the Jewish people? I hate them. When I see them on the street, I feel nauseous. She like a witch."

Teresa's attitude is not unique. Resentment is high between the Satmar Jews of Williamsburg and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for them. A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the Jews like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he or she will tell you, "We're a community of Holocaust survivors." They're keenly aware that Poland's large Jewish population was annihilated during the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore the question: "The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland," they say. Echoing the Polish government's longtime position, they add, "It was the Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people."

"We want to be respected," the Polish women say, fairly seething as they talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing someone else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of Communism. ("How can they say they are so religious? God doesn't want you to be so cheap about money," says one disgruntled woman.) Now the Poles are on the street corner, asking the Jews for a job, Jews with numbers tattooed on their arms, Jews for whom the names of Polish towns—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor—are etched in memory. The irony is lost on no one.

Many of the cleaning women are divorced or widowed. They come to New York on tourist visas and so do not have green cards. The corner supplies work, friendship, and referrals—where to find an apartment, a doctor, or a cheap meal—and it keeps them off the government's radar screen. Most are of a certain age; some, like Kaya, are elderly. Her hair is thin and her teeth are bad. "I wouldn't be here if the Communists were still in power—everybody worked, we had free health care," she says, speaking through a translator. She first came to New York two years ago on a tourist visa. "The work was so hard, and I missed my family. I cried every night. I lost 20 pounds. They give everyone a false view of how life is in America," she says. A nervous breakdown sent her back to Poland.

She arrived home to find her children unemployed, her grandchildren unable to afford college. She remembers thinking, "My life is over, but my family still has their life ahead of them." She returned to Williamsburg, where she lives in a single room with three other women. Her share of the rent is $130. She makes about $1200 a month, never eats out. Worn-out dresses hang off her bony frame. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 2:30, she waits with the alcoholics and the infirm at the Williamsburg Christian Church for the free lunch. Every available dollar is sent home.

Her grandchildren are back in college. She pays for their education with 60 hours a week, scrubbing and dusting and wiping. She cleans the refrigerator gaskets with a matchstick, as she is asked, but won't scrub the floors on her hands and knees with a shmatte (rag), as the Jews request. She insists on using a mop. This costs her work and is a major source of tension between the Poles and the Jews. The Polish women speak almost no English. On a recent morning, a street corner argument went like this:

"No shmatte—mopo, yes," says the Polish woman.

"Yes shmatte, shmatte, no mopo," replies the Jewish woman.

"Yes, mopo, yes mopo. No shmatte," The Polish woman makes a face and points to her knees.

The Jewish woman makes a circular wiping motion. One last "Yes, shmatte," and the Polish woman folds, following her new boss sullenly down Lee Avenue.

The Satmars seem genuinely bewildered, even wounded by the Polish women's complaints. "We clean our own floors on our hands and knees; it's cleaner that way," says Sarah Stern, a local resident who has used Polish cleaning women for years. As for the wages: "They get off the boat and the next day they are making more than minimum wage. We usually pay them seven dollars an hour. We are poor people; the average family here has 12 children; many of the husbands make less than they're paying the cleaning woman. How can we pay them more?" A prominent local rabbi asks simply, "If they can make more elsewhere, why are they here working for us?"

They can't make more. In Greenpoint, home to New York's Polish community, "Everyone says, 'Don't go to Williamsburg. You'll make the least money there, you'll get stuck there, you'll never learn English,' " explains Tomasz Lubas, a social worker at the Polish & Slavic Center. House cleaning is the standard route into the economy for Polish women—they are scrubbing homes all over New York City. The younger women—and those who speak some English—work through agencies or word of mouth. They make $10 to $12 an hour cleaning homes on the Upper East Side or in Park Slope. Hooper and Lee is the corner of last resort.

All through the day the Polish women come and go from the corner, finishing one job and returning to find another. An hour before sunset, the sidewalks are filled with men in black coats, and the Sabbath warning siren blows, sounding out across the rooftops. The Polish women work more quickly now, finishing the last of their cleaning. If the sun has already set, and the Jews are proscribed from touching switches or machinery, they ask the cleaning women to turn on the lights and stove before they leave. The Polish women oblige, and then, with throbbing hands, pocket their money and head back to rented rooms.

[Inyokern]

Shmatta, no mopo

[Alberta's Child]

Maybe this story is related to the following recent item from The Onion:

Polish Rapper Under Fire For Use Of The Word 'Polack'

DETROIT - MC Krakow, a popular Detroit-based rapper of Polish descent, came under fire Tuesday for his use of the word 'Polack' on his new album World Warsaw III.

"When MC Krakow casually uses the P-word, it dredges up decades of hurtful portrayals and cruel jokes for our people," said Sandy Serwacki, president of the Polish Anti-Defamation Society. "In just the song 'Ten-Inch Pierogie' alone, he uses the word 27 times."

In an official statement, MC Krakow defended his use of the word: "When I say, "Y'all be my Polacks," or "Yo, what up, Polack?," it's my way of taking the word back. Our people need to re-claim and embrace 'Polack' with pride, just like Eminem did with the word 'faggot.'"

[gaijin]

Read "Pointville". It's about, of all places, rural Iowa, and what happened there.

Relevent, and verrry enlightening.

[Landru]

So what.
These are white people of European ancestry!!
Can't you see that?
I'm afraid to inform that in the United States of America, home of the brave & land of the free?
These people are *not* members of a protected class!!
Therefore, they simply do not count.
They may, of course, clean the toilets of *a* protected-class peoples.
Naturally, they're *free* to do so; only if they freely so-choose, and, are hungry & would *like* to eat?

...shhhhh; *that's* the, "freedom" part.

[GROUCHOTWO]

It's "Postville" and, as interesting as it is, it is only the tip of the iceberg. BTW, the Lubavitchers moved to Iowa after a 'fatwa' was placed on buying Satmar kosher meat. The Satmars are by published accounts even bigger law-breakers(more violent) that the Lubavitchers.

[Inyokern]

It's "Postville" and, as interesting as it is, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

Are illegal Polish cleaning women moving to Pottsville?

[Inyokern]

No matter how far the Jews move from Poland, the Poles follow them, shmatta in hand.

[Sabramerican]

Unrequited love?

[Inyokern]

Unrequited love?

I think they secretly miss us. I really do.

What else could explain this?

[Tasha]

There must be some kind of love-hate relationship between the Jewish and the Polish people.
One time my father asked his buddy, a Lieutenant of the Democratic Party in Chicago, why the Poles and the Jews are constantly at each others' throats. His buddy is an Irish guy, and his answer was very simple: The two groups are the same. Both of them try to prove how different they are from each other. He said he had watched them for 20 years and he honestly couldn't see any difference between them. The love-hate relationship has probably gone on since Chicago was built.

[Sonny M]

There's more to it then that. I live in Greenpoint, next to Williamsburgh. The Jews really do believe that the polish helped the Nazi's kill them, and the polish here are very very catholic and devout.Some of them also feel that everyone forgets, alot of them were killed in WW2, "Everyone only remembers the jews, what about us?" Its very personal. Saying they are the same is like saying the english and the irish are the same too.

[Inyokern]

Actually, I think this is the REAL reason Poles hate Jews:

Jewish Nobel Prize Winners for Science	Polish Nobel Prize Winners for Science
Altman, Sidney	Sklodowska-Curie, Maria
Axelrod, Julius
Baltimore, David
Barany, Robert
Benacerraf, Baruj
Berg, Paul
Bethe, Hans Albrecht
Bloch, Felix
Bloch, Konrad
Blumberg, Baruch S.
Bohr, Niels
Born, Max
Brown, Herbert C.
Calvin, Melvin
Chain, Sir Ernst Boris
Charpak, Georges
Cohen, Stanley
Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude
de Hevesy, George
Edelman, Gerald M.
Ehrlich, Paul
Einstein, Albert
Elion, Gertrude B.
Erlanger, Joseph
Feynman, Richard P.
Franck, James
Friedman, Jerome I.
Furchgott, Robert F.
Gabor, Dennis
Gell-Mann, Murray
Gilbert, Walter
Gilman, Alfred G.
Glaser, Donald A.
Glashow, Sheldon L.
Goldstein, Joseph L.
Haber, Fritz
Hauptman, Herbert A.
Hertz, Gustav
Hoffmann, Roald
Hofstadter, Robert
Jacob, Francois
Josephson, Brian D.
Kandel, Eric R.
Kapitsa, Pyotr Leonidovich
Karle, Jerome
Katz, Sir Bernard
Klug, Sir Aaron
Kohn, Walter
Kornberg, Arthur
Krebs, Sir Hans Adolf
Landau, Lev Davidovich
Landsteiner, Karl
Lederberg, Joshua
Lederman, Leon M.
Lee, David M.
Levi-Montalcini, Rita
Lipmann, Fritz Albert
Lippmann, Gabriel
Loewi, Otto
Luria, Salvador E.
Lwoff, Andre
Marcus, Rudolph A.
Mechnikov, Elie
Meyerhof, Otto Fritz
Michelson, Albert Abraham
Milstein, Cesar
Moissan, Henri
Mottelson, Ben Roy
Muller, Hermann Joseph
Nathans, Daniel
Nirenberg, Marshall W.
Osheroff, Douglas D.
Pauli, Wolfgang
Penzias, Arno A.
Perl, Martin L.
Perutz, Max Ferdinand
Prusiner, Stanley B.
Rabi, Isidor Isaac
Reichstein, Tadeus
Reines, Frederick
Richter, Burton
Rodbell, Martin
Schally, Andrew V.
Schwartz, Melvin
Schwinger, Julian
Segre, Emilio Gino
Stein, William Howard
Steinberger, Jack
Stern, Otto
Temin, Howard Martin
Varmus, Harold E.
von Baeyer, Johann
Waksman, Selman
Wald, George
Wallach, Otto
Warburg, Otto Heinrich
Weinberg, Steven
Willstatter, Richard Martin
Yalow, Rosalyn

[Revolting cat!]

the Polish government's longtime position

Oh, I see. So it is "the Polish government's longtime position" and not a historical fact? I like the "longtime" especially, since it implies the long discredited Communist government as well. Hmmmm.

But that is a minor quibble. An interesting article. One question I have, why must these Jewish women employ these cleaning ladies if, as they say, they cannot afford them? Is it, I suspect, a European petty bourgeois tradition? (The petty bourgeois in Asian countries practice similar customs, it must be said.)

[Inyokern]

One question I have, why must these Jewish women employ these cleaning ladies if, as they say, they cannot afford them? Is it, I suspect, a European petty bourgeois tradition?

Good question.

Another question is why do these Polish women work for Jews if they say they hate them? Why do they come all the way across the ocean to work for Jews, whom they chased out of Poland?

[CommiesOut]

Good question.
Hm... maybe because American Jews are good like Harry Potter?
More

[Inyokern]

Bump. Illegal immigrant thread.

[Revolting cat!]

To answer your question in post # 15, you'd have to be an Eastern European (Jew or Pole) to understand. It's a love/hate relationship from both sides. And just who chased sho out from Poland is an open question, isn't it? As I understand it, in the past 50 years it's been the Commies (many of them secularized Jews themselves or like Gomulka, Polish proles married to secularized Jews,) who have been chasing the remaining Jews out of Poland, by way of releasing the public's anger (it never helped, I've read.)

Ugly history, to be sure.

[Inyokern]

"We want to be respected," the Polish women say, fairly seething as they talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing someone else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of Communism.

"I wouldn't be here if the Communists were still in power, everybody worked, we had free health care"

Sounds like they miss communism. Strange that the Poles miss communism and the Jews don't. One would think, listening to you.....

[FITZ]

As for the wages: "They get off the boat and the next day they are making more than minimum wage. We usually pay them seven dollars an hour. We are poor people; the average family here has 12 children; many of the husbands make less than they're paying the cleaning woman. How can we pay them more?"

This doesn't make any sense. How can a husband who is the sole support of 12 children and a wife, and who makes less than $7 or $8 and still afford a maid? Poor people and even not so poor people clean up their own houses.