After two and half months of striking at the Salit Quarry, we are approaching a critical junction. On Monday August 29th the Jerusalem District Court held a session to discuss a request from Salit Quarry to appoint a lawyer as a Trustee for the Quarry in order to protect it from the banks and other creditors whose bills have not been paid.
3,800 protest messages to Salit Via LaborStart – The fight goes on!
A group of 42 Palestinians are in their second month of a strike at the Salit Quarry, an Israeli-managed mine associated with Mishor Adumim, the industrial zone of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement of the West Bank.
The workers’ demands are fairly basic: reasonable salaries, regular, monthly pay slips and safe, healthy working conditions.
Though there are an estimated 300,000 Palestinians working in Israeli settlements, this organized strike—in which West Bank Palestinian employees are demanding fair treatment under Israeli law—is the first of its kind.
On Friday July 8, at 9 a.m., a delegation from the quarry management came to the protest tent at the entrance to the Salit Quarries premises, bringing envelopes containing checks for the workers’ June wages. According to Israeli law, monthly wages must be paid by the 9th day of the following month. The quarry management, which for 24 days has refused to negotiate with the Workers Advice Center (WAC-Ma’an), initially gave the impression that it would meet its legal obligations and pay wages in time. Because the workers have been striking since June 16, these wages are from the first part of June. The withholding of wages is liable to result in fines and other penalties for the management.
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.
Israeli employers, Palestinian workers and an Arab-Jewish union: Workers at Salit Quarries demand basic, fair employment terms, but the quarry management says their claims are childish. The first organized labor dispute in the West Bank is coming to a head – is this ideological adventurism or a revolutionary precedent?
WAC does not have a strike fund. We do not know how long the strike will last but we would like to have some emergency funds to give the workers in case the strike continues for over a week. If money will arrive after the strike ends it will be put in a special strike fund for future struggles.
For 27 years, since Salit Quarries began operating in the occupied West Bank under the ownership of Jews from Jerusalem, it has employed Palestinian workers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Though quarrying sand and gravel from the desert Mountains just 10 km east of Jerusalem has brought considerable profit to the owners, the workers have been employed under exploitative terms and with insufficient safety standards. Until the workers began organizing with WAC (in May 2007), the West Bank workers were employed without pay slips and without pension insurance. No tests had been carried out to ascertain the affect of the dust on the workers’ health, and there were no facilities such as a dining room, washrooms or water cooler though the quarry is located in an isolated arid region. Following claims and pressure from WAC and the workers, the quarry agreed to some improvements.
On June 16, 35 Palestinian workers at Salit Quarries in Mishor Adumim (a settlement area east of Jerusalem) began a general strike. The workers, organized with the independent Union WAC-Ma’an, are demanding an end to exploitation and humiliation, and insist on signing a first collective agreement. The strike began after the workers and the union approved a draft agreement, while the management tried to take advantage of the opposition of a small number of more privileged workers in order to break the union and avoid the agreement. WAC and the workers demand that the agreement be signed immediately. If the agreement is not signed, the strike will continue.
For 27 years, since Salit Quarries began operating in the occupied West Bank under the ownership of Jews from Jerusalem, it has employed Palestinian workers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Though quarrying sand and gravel from the desert Mountains just 10 km east of Jerusalem has brought considerable profit to the owners, the workers have been employed under exploitative terms and with insufficient safety standards. Until the workers began organizing with WAC (in May 2007), the West Bank workers were employed without pay slips and without pension insurance. No tests had been carried out to ascertain the affect of the dust on the workers’ health, and there were no facilities such as a dining room, washrooms or water cooler though the quarry is located in an isolated arid region (see story). Following claims and pressure from WAC and the workers, the quarry agreed to some improvements.
