After the demonstrations of last summer and also well before, the offices of the Workers Advice Center (WAC-Maan) have been open 365 days a year for meetings with workers from throughout the country. These workers face a harsh and frustrating reality, a reality known in the dialect of Netanyahu and his associates as “Israel’s flexible and dynamic labor market”
The following speech was written for Tel Aviv’s most recent social justice protest this past Saturday. While the speech was ultimately not read aloud, it has been translated for +972 with permission from the author, Wafa Tiara.
As in the social workers’ strike a year ago, Eini fails in his responsibilities as a workers’ leader, exploiting his links with the political elite to dictate a settlement that suits the Treasury. It will be remembered that the social-workers union rejected the settlement devised in March 2011 by Eini and the Treasury. Eini didn’t accept the position of the social workers. Instead, he helped to refer the matter to an industrial tribunal, where, under severe pressure, and in a bid to avoid restarting the negotiations from scratch without the backing of the Histadrut, the social-workers union was forced to back down.
A delegation of activists for social protest from Beit Haam, Tel Aviv, visited the WAC-MAAN headquarters in Baqa al-Gharbiya on January 14, 2012, where they met with Arab women and agricultural workers in order to examine the harsh reality affecting the Arab population under the racist economic policy that drives women out of the labor market.
At first they marched hesitantly, astonished, perhaps even with envy, as they beheld the typical Tel Aviv scene of wide green boulevards, bustling cafes, children in playgrounds, mothers with strollers, young women riding around on bicycles, and the press. It was Friday, October 28, 2011. Over 70 women agricultural workers in long dresses and headscarves marched along Rothschild Boulevard together with the same number of activists from the protest movement in Tel Aviv and the Workers Advice Center (WAC-Maan, hereinafter WAC). They didn’t know what kind of welcome to expect from Tel Aviv. But step by step, their self-confidence grew, and they began responding to the slogans Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka bellowed into the megaphone, at first shyly but later with all their strength: “Work, yes! Unemployment, no!”, “Bibi, resign, you’re not wanted anymore!”, and in Arabic, “Freedom, democracy, social justice!”
By torching the mosque in the Arab Village of Tuba-Zangariyeh in the North on the night of Oct. 2, the racists of the extreme right expressed their hatred for Israel’s Arab citizens. In everyday reality, the village of Tuba-Zangariyeh suffers from severe discrimination in infrastructure and employment at the hands of Israel’s various governments. Thousands are employed in factories and farms in the region as manpower contractor laborers, without peripheral benefits. The Tzahar Industrial Park, located next to the town, pays land taxes to nearby Jewish towns (Safed, Hazor and Rosh Pina) but Tuba-Zangariyeh doesn’t receive any of the revenues. It’s not the rightwing phalanxes who harm the town’s residents – it’s the policies of Israel’s governments that make life hell for them.
intolerable working conditions, including the lack of facilities such as a dining room, washrooms or water cooler as well as the lack of health and safety protections, pay slips or pension insurance.
The Workers Advice Center (WAC-Ma’an) unequivocally supports the social workers in their strike for improved employment terms. Their struggle highlights the distorted employment policies in Israel during the last 25 years. These policies are guided by a neo-liberal worldview which sees the organization of workers as a grave impediment which must be banished from society and the economy. At the center of the social workers’ struggle is the demand that employment terms for those employed via private NGOs and manpower agencies – about one third of all social workers (some 5,000 of 17,000) – be made equal to those employed directly by the Welfare Ministry and are thus public sector employees.
[:en]by Hen Shemesh Receurrent complaints on illegal sanctions against employees
