Palestinian Workers
New Research: WAC-MAAN – A decade of organizing Palestinian workers in the West Bank Settlements – A summary
The independent trade union center WAC-MAAN releases a comprehensive report
15/06/2019
The independent trade union center WAC-MAAN releases a comprehensive report
[:en]The Israeli government’s decision to deport 37,000 asylum seekers who
We were shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden death of RMT GS Bob Crow who was a symbol of courageous and fighting unionism.
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”
Representatives of the independent union WAC-Ma’an took part in an international trade union conference in Istanbul in November, initiated by the LabourStart website and hosted by Turkish unions. Participants included some 100 representatives from 30 countries, among them European states, Australia, North America, Africa and Iran. However the most notable delegates came from the Arab states including the those who experienced firsthand the recent revolutions: Egypt and Tunisia. The conference concentrated primarily on the issue of the international workers’ movement and the Arab Spring.
3,800 protest messages to Salit Via LaborStart – The fight goes on!
The Board of FNV Bondgenoten the Netherlands has decided to support the Workers Advice Center in the Salit workers strike, with 2000 EURO.
CAIRO — Thousands of workers packed into Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Sunday, demanding social justice in post-revolt Egypt as they celebrate their first Labour Day in three decades without ousted president Hosni Mubarak.
WAC-MAAN representatives have recently conducted high level meetings with trade unions in the U.S. and Holland. WAC-MAAN, a relatively new trade union, makes continuous efforts to broaden its international ties and to learn from the experience of the global workers’ movement. The visits were a part of this effort. In September, a WAC-MAAN delegation met with the leadership of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union (UE) in its central office in Pittsburgh, U.S.A. The UE, an independent union with left-wing views was represented by union president John Hovis, Treasurer Bruce Klipple, Director of international affairs Robin Alexander, Steve Tormey, secretary responsible for General Electric workers and also Bob Kingsley, Joseph Cohen and Salia Warren.
A visit by Workers Advice Center (WAC-Maan) representatives to the Netherlands’ largest trade union, the FNV, revealed the enormous gap between an Israeli trucker’s wage and that of his Dutch counterpart. While in the Netherlands a truck driver works eight hours a day (48 hours a week) and earns some NIS 10,000 (2,000 euro) basic wage, in Israel a truck driver often has to work at least 12 hours a day (68 hours a week) for just NIS 7,000 (1,400 euro, including bonuses). This works out at NIS 48 (9.6 euro) per hour for the Dutch driver, and just NIS 24 (4.8 euro) for the Israeli driver – exactly half.
