WAC’s Executive Director meets OECD delegation:
“The government’s promises on employment of Arab women remain unfulfilled”
12/09/2012
“The government’s promises on employment of Arab women remain unfulfilled”
One after another, in the spirit of the social activists of the beginning of the last century, they stepped up onto the wooden crate on the side of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and cried out for a better future.
The struggle to empower Arab women and assist them in obtaining agricultural work did not start last summer, and was not a result of the social protest. This struggle started six years ago, with a special project to open jobs in agriculture for Arab women, with all peripheral benefits and according to the law. Getting wage slips which outline reductions from wages and peripheral benefits may seem to be the absolute minimum, but for many Arab women who are desperate to work this is an achievement. Especially when most farmers prefer to employ imported laborers under even poorer terms.
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.
WAC-MAAN challenges the assertion, made by agriculture sector leaders, that taxing farmers for hiring foreign workers would not persuade them to give jobs to Israelis instead. The union claims that farmers prefer Thai workers, who are cheaper.
The Nov. 28 session of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers was intended to debate putting an end to the import of migrant labor for construction and agriculture, and encouraging Israeli workers in these sectors. But instead, we were witness once again to a display of impotency in the face of the powerful farmers’ lobby. The debate exposed the well-known fact that there is nobody in the political establishment who is able or willing to do what must clearly be done: stopping the import of migrant laborers and opening up jobs to local workers especially Arab women.
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!”
Interview with Sheherezad Issa, agricultural laborer from Furidis (Sheherezad is also among the women who appear in the documentary “Look at Us” by Video 48)
The streets of Tel Aviv could not remain indifferent to the energy of dozens of working and unemployed women, both Jewish and Arab, who marched along a central chic boulevard on International Women’s Day 2011. As they marched, the women shouted slogans in Hebrew and Arabic calling for fair employment, condemning unemployment and poverty, expressing solidarity with the social workers (who have been in an ongoing labor dispute), and demanding both “bread and roses.”
Women and worker’s Organizations invite you to Woman’s day march. Arab and Jewish women call for fair employment and social justice on Tuesday, the 8th of March, in Tel Aviv.
