Gayle Kirshenbaum is a former nanny employer, current homecare employer, and a founding member of Hand in Hand.
My story starts in our apartment in Brooklyn in 2001, when I walked in the door one day and I could hear my three-month-old, Aaron, doing a baby-version of a belly laugh for the first time ever. I then found Aaron getting their diaper changed on the lap of Debby Douglass, who was working for us as a part-time nanny. Debby had three boys of her own and seemed to never have a need for a changing table—which I just couldn’t fathom—and was always able to get Aaron smiling—and to get me to smile too — to make of me a much less anxious and more joyful young mother. Debby also helped me to accept that, while we were developing a close bond, at the end of the day, she was a professional care worker and I had specific obligations to her as her employer—a word I had resisted, until then.
But the fact was—it was never Debby’s job to teach me how to be an employer. As an immigrant from Jamaica, it was never her job to teach me what it means to be an immigrant worker in this country. I came to understand that domestic employers needed to educate ourselves—and each other—to be the kinds of ethical employers we often wrongly took ourselves to be. And that we needed clear government standards for our domestic workplaces. Which is why I eventually got on a bus to Albany as a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which was working in coalition with extraordinary domestic worker organizers—like the fabulous Alison Julien, and so many others—organizers who were just starting their years of fighting for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, which would be the first of its kind in the country.
And I’ll tell you what happened when we got to Albany—what happened was that legislators looked at us in utter disbelief, as they tried to understand how and why workers and employers would be showing up together, with a message of solidarity, a message that justice for workers means investing in care and community for us all.
What also happened was that legislators started telling us what was going in their own homes: for a few, private moments behind closed doors, the state reps told us about the care needs of their loved ones and the care crises some of them were facing as they struggled to navigate the same broken system as the rest of us. And when I later started telling my story at community events, my story of feeling isolated and confused as a new mother trying to be an employer in my own home, I’d finish speaking and would be immediately surrounded by people who urgently wanted to tell me their stories of needing or providing domestic care.
So we soon began to see the need to build something entirely new — to forge a model for organizing employers that would center honesty, vulnerability, and connection — and which would lay the groundwork for Hand in Hand. We aimed to go both broad and deep. We learned, over time, that educating both employers and legislators about domestic worker justice meant that we all had to be engaged in an ongoing practice of collective learning about structural racism and white supremacy culture; about immigrant lives and right; about ableism and disability justice. And we came to envision Hand in Hand as an organization that would be there for members at every stage of their lives.
That baby of mine that Debby made to giggle on her lap is now the 23-year-old right—and I am no longer a nanny employer but an employer of home attendants for my parents, one of whom has dementia. I feel so grateful for this movement, which has held me, personally and politically, for over 20 years—and to have had the opportunity to help build Hand in Hand, the organization I need now more than ever — as I seek to be a good employer of the extraordinary care workers—Beth, Martha, and Vera—who are at my parents’ home in Michigan every day, and who make my life in New York possible.
