In October 2020 the Registrar of Israeli NGOs accepted our request to change the name of our organization. Accordingly, our official name, till then “WAC-MAAN – Workers Advice Center,” is now “MAAN – Workers Association.”
The name-change isn’t just a formality. More than two decades ago we founded the Workers Advice Center, whose goal was to defend individual workers against employers who violated their rights. In the course of the years, our defense took a more collective form, making us one of the four general workers associations in Israel. The new name suits our activities better.
MAAN has a unique task in the field of labor-union activity in Israel, a field characterized by sharp sectoral separation according to nationality and gender, with extreme discrimination and exploitation of weak populations. MAAN organizes workers by the principle of full equality, including Israelis and Palestinians, women and men, Arabs and Jews, white collar and blue.
Since becoming a labor union in 2010, MAAN has signed a series of collective agreements with both private and public employers, among them the educational NGO Hand-in-Hand, the music conservatory in Rosh Haayin, the Tzarfati Garage in the West Bank Industrial Zone of Maaleh Adumim, and many others. In parallel, we continue our grass-roots activities to improve working conditions and prevent on-the-job accidents. In the area of Israel’s Triangle between the coast and the West Bank, as well as in Jerusalem, we operate projects for advancing the status of Arab women in the job market.
MAAN adopts an egalitarian agenda for a green economy. To accomplish this, it aims to build a broad front of Israeli and Palestinian organizations.
Our vision is detailed in a statement we published in October 2020entitled “The fight against COVID-19 and the unprecedented economic crisis require a new paradigm of Israeli-Palestinian partnership“
We call on workers to contact MAAN and join our ranks. All who believe in political, economic, and gender equality are invited to take part in our struggle toward building a better, more just society.
