Sweating on the Sabbath
Sikh construction workers are actually a common sight in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn:
Pictured during one of my regular jaunts through Williamsburg… The boys with the black hats were on their way to temple which was just down the street, the boys working with the shovels were mixing concrete by hand, and laying bricks outside a Jewish building. The picture was taken on a Saturday. I am intrigued about what they found so interesting; working on a Saturday, the turbans, the manual labor… [Link]
Maybe they’re staring at the one guy whose head isn’t covered. Freak.
(photo by Seamus Murray)
on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008, 8:06 pm in Holidays, Photographs, Religion, Sikhs › 
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Interesting picture, Manish. The incongruity - to my eyes - is not the turbans instead of the helmets most construction workers wear. But the Oxford shirts and jeans? What happened to overalls and work boots and gloves?
Anything you can add on the conditions these and similar Sikh construction workers are working in - labour, safety, etc? I hadn’t much heard of this.
Interesting point. I’ve seen ‘em in turbans but never in hardhats. Wonder whether they got an exemption or just look the other way.
I wonder if the whole thing might be so under-the-table-ish that things like hardhats, overalls, gloves, safety goggles (mixing concrete by hand?) just goes even more under the radar. Nobody wants to know, nobody asks.
Even if it isn’t for the Sabbath, there would be union rules around early morning work on Saturdays (I would think). But that’s if it was a union gig at all.
I hope it’s not another H-2B visa worker exploitation thing.
A friend says Sikh architects he knows in NYC often don’t wear hardhats, and he thinks it’s a formal exemption from construction code. But what strikes me about the photo is that the construction workers I see in India are rail-thin whereas these guys are stout.
Manish, my point was that being Sikhs, I could fully understand if they weren’t wearing hardhats. The other things like not wearing goggles, work boots and overalls are more difficult to rationalize - except if the whole operation was so under the table that nobody asked, nobody told, nobody knew, nobody cared.
Or, if it were just someone and his buddies getting together to fix up a house, or a weekend renovation project, which, since it is not commercial, doesn’t just fly under the radar, it has no signature at any altitude! I’ve done things like that with/for my buddies. And we did it in the best we could in terms of workwear, T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps - but nobody in their right minds wears Oxford shirts to a construction job!
In real life I’ve never seen them in goggles or overalls or, outside of this photo, button-down shirts and polos. They’re usually in t-shirts, jeans and boots.