ABOUT US
Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) is a 100% volunteer run organizing drive of low-income service, temporary, part-time and seasonal workers and their families
0%
Volunteer run
$100
Government funding
0k
ESWA members signed
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IN UNITY THERE IS
STRENGTH
History
Est. 1976
Since our founding in 1976, EASTERN SERVICE WORKERS ASSOCIATION (ESWA) has built a membership of more than 45,000 low-income service workers who work in low-paying jobs in warehouses, as caregivers and domestic workers, in tourism, and as gig workers, part-time, seasonal and temporary workers.
Purpose
Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) unites Monroe County’s lowest-paid service workers and their allies to fight to end poverty conditions and the government policies that create them. We recognize that in order to organize, we must take collective action to ensure our day-to-day survival. ESWA’s benefit program performs neither acts of charity nor isolated acts of goodwill, but rather helps members to obtain what is rightfully theirs in a context that promotes their best interest on all levels.
Raise Your Voice
You can learn how to fight to keep a service worker family’s lights on, defeat energy companies and the agencies responsible for regulating them that put profit before people and planet, help workers win back unpaid wages, expunge medical debt and fight government and corporate policies that are pushing workers into lower poverty wages.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Yearly: In response to rising utility costs and rampant shutoffs of low-income families, ESWA members mobilize to hold government agencies, such as the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC), accountable to their legal mandate to protect rate payers. ESWA members have won over $1.6 billion in cuts to proposed rate hikes and saved dozens of lives threatened by utility profiteering.
ESWA helps members win back unpaid wages and compensation for workplace injuries.
Seasonally: Volunteer advocates assist dozens of ESWA members preventing shutoffs of electricity and water service, or restoring disconnected power to their homes.
Monthly: Volunteer dentists, doctors and nurses, assisted by volunteer lay advocates, provide free-of-charge non-emergency dental care, preventive medical checkups and twice monthly medical education and information sessions on problems like diabetes and workplace injuries.
Weekly: ESWA runs twice weekly budget-saving healthy food distributions through teams of grocers and produce businesses, drivers, sorters and ESWA member families working together to save hundreds of dollars for household budgets.
Daily: ESWA provides a material manifestation of hope by uniting the most exploited workers along with allies from all sectors of our community, filling emergency food requests, providing organizer training and showing members and volunteers how to fight and win collective victories.
Our carbon footprint, nearly nil —
Our organizing drive’s human impact, huge!
Who was Sojourner Truth?
Featured in ESWA’s logo, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) was a towering American abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was born into slavery in the Hudson Valley area of New York as Isabella Baumfree. She began working at the age of five, was sold three times and endured repeated abuses, rapes and harsh conditions as a slave in New York. In 1826, at the age of 29, she boldly “walked away by daylight” carrying her infant daughter, Sophia, to freedom. She chose the name Sojourner Truth and became a powerful, yet illiterate, preacher and orator, famous for her dictated autobiography detailing her life as a slave and her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech. She worked with Frederick Douglass on the Underground Railroad and later aided the Union’s war effort in the Civil War. After the formal end of slavery in 1865, Sojourner Truth continued demanding women’s right to vote, which was not won until 1920, decades after her death. Sojourner Truth believed and taught others that it was possible to create a new world through their collective actions, and had the courage to fight for that belief her entire life.