ESWA

ABOUT US

ESWA is a 100% volunteer run organizing drive of low-income service, temporary, part-time and seasonal workers and their families

$100

0%

0k

Government funding

Volunteer

Members signed

Two women work together to pack vegetables into bags.
Two ESWA volunteers register a new member during a canvass in the winter.
An ESWA member reads an explanation of the benefits to an interested worker.
Two volunteers help a women with a baby to fill out an application.
Two ESWA members share winter weather clothing at a distribution.
Historical photo showing ESWA's office in the 1980s.

The building at 6 West End Ave. in 1980, when it was the Vivian Cooper Community Service Center, the precursor to the current ESWA Office Central

History

Est. 1976

Since our founding in 1976, EASTERN SERVICE WORKERS ASSOCIATION (ESWA) has built a membership of more than 25,000 low-income service workers who work in low-paid jobs in warehouses, as caregivers and domestic workers, in tourism, and as gig workers, part-time, seasonal and temporary workers.

An ESWA member registers a new member in a park.

Purpose

Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) unites New Jersey’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.

An ESWA member smiles and gives a thumbs up.

Accomplishments

  • Yearly: ESWA helps members win back unpaid wages and other 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 and preventive medical check ups to members through monthly general medical sessions

  • Weekly: Volunteers host weekly Survival English Classes to members to teach essential English phrases

  • Daily: ESWA provides a material manifestation of hope by uniting the most exploited workers along with allies from all sectors of our community through filling emergency food requests, providing organizer training and demonstrating how to fight and win collective victories

Central New Jersey Service Worker Facts

An infographic entitled Service Worker Facts comparing the wealth and revenues of large corporations in New Jersey in contrast to the high poverty statistics for residents in Trenton, such as 1 in 3 Trenton children live in poverty.

Don’t Mourn, organize!

Our carbon footprint, nearly nil. Our organizing drive’s human impact, huge!

Video of the Delaware & Raritan Canal State Park behind ESWA’s office central

This is ESWA

Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) is a free and voluntary unincorporated membership association of thousands of Trenton’s lowest-income workers, founded in 1976 to pursue short- and long-term solutions to poverty conditions. Health aides, retail clerks, food service and temporary workers (including thousands who labor in poorly heated or cooled warehouses for less than $17 an hour and no benefits), are among those who constitute ESWA’s membership. Their common plight is insufficient income for basic survival needs. Life expectancies in poor neighborhoods are 15 years shorter than those living in more affluent communities.

ESWA members are women and men, single and with families, seniors on fixed incomes, immigrants and those born here. These diverse groups together built ESWA’s self-help, free-of-charge benefit programs: food, clothing, utility and medical bill advocacy, preventive medical care, non- emergency dental care and legal advice provided by volunteer professionals. Available seven days a week, 365 days a year, the benefit program is a vibrant example of mutual assistance, in which those receiving aid gain leadership and organizing skills and in turn aid others.

ESWA grows through 100% volunteer involvement, free of government and strings-attached funding. ESWA has an unprecedented grassroots foundation of support anchored in the bonds developed between all sectors of our community working directly together.

ESWA members have fought denials of health care, utility rate hikes, obstacles to employment, and much more. With service and temporary workers suffering from dangerous heat waves and poor air quality due to human-caused climate change, we’ve demanded that the government act to stop and reverse climate change. And we’ve spoken out against government policies that help billion-dollar corporations increase their profits through speculation while keeping those of us in the productive economy divided and fighting each other.

ESWA sees that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are consistent with the programs and principles which ESWA has built and fought for since our inception, and so ESWA’s membership has endorsed the 2030 Agenda. For more information on the SDGs, visit the “Go Green” page.

Who was Sojourner Truth

Featured in ESWA’s logo, Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), a domestic worker, was a tireless advocate and fighter for the plight of the most exploited and marginalized. Herself a freed slave, she fought for the abolition of slavery, as well as the rights of African American women who were denied the right to vote even after the formal end of slavery. Sojourner Truth believed and taught others that it was possible to create a new world through their collective actions.