European Labor Delegation Studies the Labor Market in Israel/Palestine

FOR the week leading up to May 1, a delegation of 14 trade unionists from seven European countries visited Israel and the West Bank at the invitation of the Workers Advice Center (WAC, ma'an in Arabic). Its purpose was to study first-hand the problems of groups facing discrimination in the local labor market, focusing on the construction industry. The groups are the Arab citizens of Israel, the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and the migrant workers from Europe and Asia.

The delegates worked 16 hours a day. They talked with academics, social activists and the workers themselves. Assaf Adiv, WAC National Coordinator, presented the draft of a working paper, abridged at this link. My journal of the visit follows:

April 26: The day was devoted to migrant workers. Dr. Leonard Hammer, an expert in the field of international covenants on questions of labor, told the Delegation: "During the 1950's, Israel aspired to win international legitimacy. It was among the first nations to sign, ratify and incorporate in its law books the international labor conventions. Today, when the Israeli labor market includes Palestinians and migrants, Israel is in no hurry to sign, much less ratify and incorporate, the UN's new Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families."

Dr. Roy Wagner of Kav La'Oved (Worker's Hotline) painted a grim picture, attacking the inaction of the Histadrut. He also criticized the tacit collaboration of the embassies that have workers in Israel: the 'sending countries', for the most part, see the migrant workers as sources of dollars to be funneled into their economies. "Of the illegal workers here," said Wagner, "70% arrived legally, but the miserable conditions motivated them to go underground."

Sigal Rozen of the Hotline for Migrant Workers pointed out that the migrants had managed to develop a supporting social network, but the Migration Police have destroyed it by deporting the leaders. The Delegation also heard from Attorneys Ahuva Zaltzberg and Dror Meir of the Bar Association; from Yossi Dahan of the Adva Center for Social Research; and from Dr. Shmuel Amir, a labor researcher from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. We also toured a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv where many migrants live.

April 27: Visit to Galilee. The Delegation devoted this day to the Arab construction workers in Israel. After meeting with WAC team leaders at our office in Nazareth, we went to a lookout point. We compared the Jewish city of Upper Nazareth, which boasts a large industrial area, with Nazareth itself, Israel's biggest Arab city, with nary a single factory. We could also see the Renaissance Hotel, built for tourists who never came: this last year it has served as a detention center for illegal migrants prior to deportation.

In the afternoon, we visited another Arab city, Um al-Fahm. Here, from another vantage point, a group of WAC youth showed us the separation fence dividing Israel from the West Bank. When it is complete, it will shut out thousands of Palestinian workers who, until now, have managed to sneak back and forth illegally. (This illegal labor has been a kind of social safety valve for the West Bank). While looking, we saw three get through at a place where the fence is not yet finished.

We then visited WAC's new center in Um al-Fahm, where 15 workers awaited us, most from the youth group. Asma Agbarieh, our coordinator for youth work in the area, talked about the need for labor education: "The marginalization of the Arab manual worker is twofold. First, he is marginal in Israeli society because he's an Arab. Second, he is marginal because Arab society itself tends to see the manual worker as someone who 'didn't succeed'. That is the point where we want to make a change." Agbarieh compared the three perspectives among which the Arab worker today must find an identity: religious fundamentalism, nationalism or class-consciousness. The first two, she said, encourage him to shut himself up in a group. Only the third connects him to the wider world. "That," she told the delegates, "is the importance of your visit here."

Salah Athamneh, who has been a member of WAC for the last two of his 27 years, confirmed that society considers the worker a "zero". "How do you deal with this problem?" he asked the Delegation. Harry Kappelhof, a dockworker in the FNV Bondgenoten (Netherlands), made this reply: "A worker has to make a leap and become active." Faustina Van Aperen, director of the WCL's International Solidarity Foundation (Belgium), told the parable of the single stick and the bundle of sticks. She gathered some pencils of various colors into a bunch and said: "You can break one pencil, but you can't break a bunch, even if they're of different colors and kinds."

We finished the day at nearby Kufr Qara, visiting the mural that Mike Alewitz painted at WAC's behest, entitled "No Walls Between Workers." We then joined WAC workers for a sumptuous dinner in the village.

April 28: Dr. Noah Levine Epstein of the University of Tel Aviv provided the academic dimension to the experiences in Galilee. "Israel has a norm," he said, "of encouraging the employment of Jewish workers. This is thought to be acceptable, even though its practical effect is clear discrimination against Arabs. There is also a widespread practice of limiting the acceptance of Arabs into certain companies by claiming state security. Frequently this claim is raised without objective reason, closing job opportunities to Arabs without justification."

Epstein also described a dramatic drop in the participation of Arab men in the labor force as they grow older. "I checked the figures for Arab men aged 35 in 1980. Their participation rate was then at its height: 89.4%. In the year 2002, the same men were 55-64 years old. Their participation rate had dropped to 34.8%. The corresponding figures for Jewish men were 91.3% in 1980 and 70.6% in 2002. Clearly, the drop in Arab participation is the consequence of importing migrants to Israel precisely in occupations where Arabs traditionally found jobs."

April 29. Meetings with government officials in the morning. First, a senior team from Israel's Finance Ministry, including Yuval Rachlevski, head of the Wages and Labor Department. The team made a detailed slide presentation on the state of the economy: "In the last ten years," they said, "the number of foreign workers has grown from 30,000 to 300,000 (or 12.5% of the workforce). In an economy with 11% unemployment, such a proportion is irrational. The aim of the Finance Ministry is to transfer Israelis from welfare to work.

"In 1994," the Finance team continued, "there was great demand for construction workers because of the big wave of Russian immigration. Yet the Territories had been put under closure because of the security situation, and there were enormous pressures to permit the importation of workers from abroad. The government then agreed to negotiate under pressure, without planning and without weighing the long-term implications of this decision. The supervision was inadequate compared to the flow of imported labor, and this has led to the difficult, complex situation of today.

"Those who suffered most from the importation of foreign workers were the Palestinians from the Territories. The Arab laborers in Israel, who worked in the same branches as most of the migrants, also lost their jobs because of this. The trend we see in the last few years is one of Arab Israeli workers returning to the construction branch, and this is encouraging." The team also instructed the Delegation in the neoliberal economics of Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "Israel is number one in the world when it comes to strikes in the public sector. There is a need to limit the right to strike."

From there we went to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. We met with Eli Paz, the deputy director, who was joined by senior staff members. Paz's words confirmed what the delegates had heard on former days: "The building firms want to employ foreign workers because they are cheaper. Even Arab contractors I've met hire foreign workers, despite the fact that in their villages there's a reservoir of builders. We estimate that there are potentially enough Arab workers in Israel to fill the need, and we are making an effort to re-introduce them into the construction branch."

Paz said that 10,000 Israelis have gone back into construction in this past year, most of them Arabs. As a result, he claimed, the unemployment rate in the Arab sector has dropped from 14% to 11.5%. He severely criticized the governments whose subjects work in Israel: "There is no readiness on the part of the sending countries to take action against the personnel companies operating in their lands. Every such company has an Israeli partner, and we at the Ministry do what we can in our field to halt the operations of any company that transgresses the law with regard to foreign workers. There are already 40 personnel companies whose licenses to import workers have been revoked because they violated the law."

After lunch we divided the Delegation into two parts. One group talked with Attorney Bassam Karkabi and Asma Agbarieh about WAC's work in East Jerusalem. The two focused on the special problems of the jobless there who are required to prove their residency in the city in order to qualify for benefits from the National Insurance Institute.

The other group met with Ghassan Muklashi, director of the "Jewish-Arab Institute" in the Histadrut. Muklashi said that the Histadrut today, with 700,000 members, is engaged in a difficult struggle with the government. The delegates asked about the Histadrut's position concerning foreign workers. Muklashi pointed out that the Histadrut is pressing for legislation that will lead to equal conditions, "but we aren't able to work in the field to enforce the labor laws. We are scarce on resources and have to focus our concern on the workers who pay dues." Asked how the Histadrut intends to observe the First of May, Muklashi said: "The Histadrut does not observe the First of May. This is a sensitive issue for the Likudniks among us, and [General Secretary] Amir Peretz prefers not to stir up superfluous frictions within the coalition."

In the evening the group re-assembled at the hotel in Tel Aviv, and I led a political discussion, which served as an introduction to our visit the next day in the Territories and East Jerusalem.

April 30: A first lesson in Occupation: Kalandia Checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah in Area A. Israel forbids Israelis to enter Area A. All the delegates got through, as well as Assaf Adiv, whom the soldiers did not check. They checked the video team and me, and we were not permitted to cross: "You want to be Tenenbaum II?" (The reference was to an Israeli kidnapped by the Hezbollah and recently swapped for hundred of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.)

The destination of those who got through was the center of the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions (GFPTU). Its director, Shaher Saad, had to reach Ramallah from Nablus. He phoned to tell us he could not get past the Nablus checkpoint. Instead the delegates met with Hussein Fuqaha, a member of the executive board of the PGFTU and head of its Ramallah office. Fuqaha was joined by Muhammed Aruri and Amneh Rimawi, members of the GFPTU Working Committee. They talked about the difficulties caused by the separation wall. They put the unemployment rate in the Territories today at over 50%. "There are simply no jobs," they said. Thousands sit in jail because they tried to enter Israel to find work.

Aruri was bitter about the Histadrut: "It signed an accord with the PGFTU in 1995, agreeing to help us with legal expenses for workers sent by us from the Territories. They stopped the arrangement at the start of the Intifada. Despite the terrible suffering of the Palestinian workers, we haven't heard a peep of solidarity from the Histadrut."

After the meeting, the delegates rejoined us at the refugee camp of Shu'afat on the northeast side of Jerusalem, minus Assaf. The soldiers had checked his ID on the way back and taken him into custody. I made some calls to secure his release. Meanwhile, the group joined WAC members from the camp, who led it on a tour.

The visit was disturbing. Since the start of the Intifada, a checkpoint has stood at the entrance. Shu'afat's residents have Israeli ID cards and used to be able to work in Israel. The new separation wall will exclude them from Jerusalem, and no one knows what will become of them.

Assaf Adiv was released after signing a statement that he would not enter Area A again without a permit. We made our way to Jaffa for the first of two May First celebrations. At Bamat Etgar, the Delegation organizers spoke, as well as Danish delegate Helene Ellemann Jensen of SiD. We sang workers' songs, including "Joe Hill" and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", as well as a local one: "Mix the cement, Ahmed." A satirical "panel of experts" brought the house down.

May 1. Last day. Morning of summarizing and brainstorming. The delegates called the visit as a big success. They decided to adopt the working paper and use what they had learned in order to take action on several fronts: within their trade unions, among new unions, and in international institutions. Cooperation with WAC will increase.

We drove to WAC's May First celebration in Haifa.

The following day the Delegation issued, from Amsterdam, a press release, expressing the group's shock at "the grave and humiliating situation confronting Palestinian and migrant workers." The full statement. n

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