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From Challenge # 80  July-August 2003

 

A Job to Win Premiers at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque

ON JUNE 26, Video '48 held the premier screening of A Job to Win, preceded by a demonstration. The event attracted live TV coverage, for it came in the midst of an ongoing public debate about the importation of unorganized foreign workers and their effect on the local job market. At the protest vigil before the screening, 60 workers, all of them WAC members, came straight from the construction sites wearing their work clothes and hardhats.

A Job to Win concerns the plight of Arab construction workers in Israel, most of whom lost their positions in the 1990's when the government permitted contractors to import cheap labor.

Rising unemployment in the Arab sector was a factor in the spread of the Intifada to Israel (October 2000). Aware of the causal connection, the government has intermittently "closed the skies" to foreign labor, but contractors claim that Israelis do not want to work. The film disputes this, presenting interviews both with jobseekers and with figures in the upper echelons of Israel's establishment. It also shows how one organization, the Workers Advice Center, took up the challenge. (WAC – called Ma'an in Arabic – has found jobs for 600 local workers so far.) Speaking in A Job to Win, the organization's National Coordinator, Assaf Adiv, points out that WAC upholds the rights of all workers. Conditions must be equal for all in each industrial sector, he says, be they Arab or Jewish or migrants from abroad.

After the film, a panel organized by Video '48 discussed the topic and answered questions from an audience of 200. The panel members were Adiv, construction worker Nassim Athamneh; and Miriam Darmoni Sharvit, who heads the Hotline for Migrant workers in Tel Aviv. Here is a selection:

Adiv: The contractors claim that local people aren't willing to work in construction. This is simply untrue, as WAC has shown. The problem is a different one. There are still large companies waiting for the cheap and exploitable gold mine of foreign workers, which they use as a hammer to break the local workforce. If the "skies" are re-opened, even the workers WAC has managed to place are likely to lose their jobs. That is one reason why we demand that the "skies" be closed to further imports of foreign labor.

Athamneh: First of all, I want to say how much the film moved me. I saw myself getting up early when it is still dark, going to work, eating with my friends at the site… I want to emphasize that the contractors’ claims are baseless. When I started to work with WAC, I received many calls from people in my town who also wanted to join. I placed as many as I could, but we are waiting for more work. Believe me, nobody prefers sitting at home on unemployment compensation.

Darmoni Sharvit: I am very happy to be here today. The State of Israel is trying to foster the impression that the foreign workers are the problem. We agree with WAC that the foreign workers are not the problem. We are a human-rights organization that relates to foreign workers as human beings, not as thieves who have come here to steal work from the locals. The foreign workers were invited to Israel. Furthermore, when they arrive they suffer enormously. They are dependent on their employer, and any worker who protests against the job conditions is immediately labeled a "troublemaker". In many cases workers run away from their employers and thereby become illegal, losing their license to work. The contractor has permission to deport such workers and import others to replace them. In other words, there is a well-oiled mechanism of importing and deporting workers, which we call the "revolving door" policy. We are against further imports of foreign workers that only make their lives more miserable, and we oppose the cruel deportation policy.

Challenge staff

For related articles, please visit WAC's web page: WAC Home