Invisible Hands: The Labor Exploitation of Ethiopian and Eritrean Women in the U.S.
By Yohana Liben
It’s 9 in the evening and I’m helping my mother write a letter in English as she was ordered to do so by her manager’s boss. My mother and I keep arguing with one another. I am crankier than usual because I have an exam the next morning in my Chemistry class. My mother is feeling particularly sensitive because she doesn’t feel like she has done anything wrong, yet this letter determines exactly that. We are writing this in my old Algebra 2 journal, and we’ve been at it for a couple of hours now.
For some reason, I can’t seem to articulate my mother’s experience, and this is making my frustration grow even more. I ask her to repeat the words she’s stated again so I ensure I don’t miss a detail, as I scrap pieces of paper where I messed up and try again on a new, crisp, loose-leaf, college-ruled piece of paper from the journal. I go back and forth between reading the letter aloud to myself, my mother, and my sister to ensure we are all on the same page, literally.
My sister is heading to bed because she has to be up for work in the morning. I try not to disturb her too much as I continue to struggle writing this letter for my mother. My mom repeats her “statement” to me verbally in her native tongue, Amharic, and I try my best to cross-translate her experiences in English, whilst being sure my words still carry the weight of her experiences. This leads to me interrogating my mother with questions that unintentionally pierced the front she had put up. She breaks down into tears. This is one of three times I’ve ever seen my mother cry so profusely, the other two being when her grandfather passed and younger sister shortly after.
Inatē mini honeshali? — Mommy, what’s going on with you?
It’s now midnight, and we are weeping together in the living room of our two-bedroom apartment that we’ve lived in for nine years now. My mother has been dealing with racial tension at work as the only black woman in the kitchen of the middle school cafeteria where she has worked for years. The letter we are writing together is about the fact that she served one less chicken nugget than she was supposed to during lunchtime last Friday, and now she could lose her job. The job she has been working at for the past ten years. The job she planned on retiring from. The job she has never missed a day of work at.
Growing up, my mother has been very intentional about sending one message: to never work a labor job a day in my life. This is because she has worked tirelessly as a cab driver, waitress, cashier, and presently a lunch lady. She knows that it is the kind of work that will keep you from your kids for days on end and will physically wear down your body. In keeping this promise to my mother, I’ve pursued higher education opportunities like working internships for world-leading companies in the business industry to ensure I can be economically liberated.
My work at Project LIBE (Heart in Tigrinya) is an extension of that promise as I collect research and use data points to develop projects aiming to do exactly that – economically empower migrant women in the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. This project began as a thesis statement that an Eritrean diaspora woman and visionary of the nonprofit Project LIBE wrote for a distinction in her Master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam. From writing 74 pages of research about the objectification of Ethiopian and Eritrean women exacerbating their labor exploitation to founding a nonprofit about liberating these very women, we’ve all come a long way as diaspora of these communities.
If there is one thing that my internship with Project LIBE has taught me is that money is power. The only people who dispute this statement are the people who already have it and, in turn, are blinded by its effectiveness. They take for granted the access money has granted them and mistake their accomplishments as having been fully from their own volition.
Project LIBE’s Economic Empowerment Team, with which I have been interning for the past year now, has remained in the research and development stage of all of our projects for just shy of eight months of my time with them.
It is only when I was selected as one of the Center for Immigration Policy & Research grant awardees and my work was able to be funded in the Fall that the bottom half of my time with LIBE has truly transformed. I’ve been fortunate enough to dedicate so much more time to the project as a result, instead of working the front desk at the Cultural Center or searching for a secondary job to pay for college living expenses.
With this newfound flexibility, I’ve been able to explore partnerships with organizations in Colorado such as the Boys & Girls Club, ECDC African Community Center, Ernst & Young LLP, and the University of Denver’s very own Center for Community Engagement to advance Scholarship and Learning. The vision behind working with these organizations is to launch a project in conjunction with coexisting spaces trusted by the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. We are aiming to launch a project at the start of this Summer that will focus on the following problem areas we’ve identified to be major obstacles for our target communities: child care, language, and limited transferable skills.
We are aiming to bridge partnerships with these organizations to address these problem areas in a few different ways, our primary one being creating an online job board for migrant women looking for employment. The hope is to connect them with businesses that prioritize hiring their demographic and are willing to meet them where they are in this extremely competitive job market.
As I see the seeds of my labor with Project LIBE bloom, I can’t help but revisit my mother. The motivation behind my pursuit of nonprofit work despite working in corporate finance and big data. The research I do and the data I collect for this organization are slow and, at times, feel like a dead end, as does working for any nonprofit organization. Then I remind myself what the labor workforce has done to my mother. The fact that serving one less chicken nugget on a sunny Friday could’ve cost her job, a comfortable retirement, and ultimately her economic liberation.
It is so easy as a diaspora to keep our eyes on the prize, put our heads down, and simply not work a labor job. I argue that it is not enough. We need to work for the people working labor jobs. Simply creating generational wealth for ourselves and future families isn’t going to cut it anymore. To break generational cycles of poverty is to grasp the base, loosen the soil, and clear the roots.
I propose a new promise to keep to my mother and all migrant women who deserve their economic liberation.
Inatē arogewin zer nekiye addis zer itekilalehu — To uproot the problem and plant new seeds.
-------
Yohana received a CIPR student internship grant for an internship with Project LIBE.