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.
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.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, we will organize and take to the streets to raise women’s struggles for justice on the public agenda.
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.
The last few days have seen a successful end to a long legal battle over demands to instate excavation workers as regular employees of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). About three years ago, dozens working for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) at the archaeological site of Ras al-Amud near Jerusalem were summoned by a representative of Brik, the personnel firm through which they were employed. He told them that all who had worked for more than nine months would not be hired in the future. Four days later, workers at the Um Tuba site, all Brik employees, were told the same thing. None received a letter of dismissal.
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.
Following a prolonged struggle and a three-month-long strike during the last summer the Salit quarry was declared bankrupt and placed in the head of the receivers. On 12 December 2011 the Jerusalem District court gave its imprimatur to a creditors’ arrangement for the quarry. The settlement ensured financial compensation to the employees but enabled the construction companies to take over the quarry without any commitment to employ the workers. Notwithstanding the Israeli institutional indifference to the fate of the Palestinian workers, the Salit employees and the Workers Advice Center (WAC-MAAN) succeeded in demonstrating the power of cross-border solidarity. There are some important lessons embedded in this historical and ongoing struggle.
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.
The Israeli building contractors got what they wanted when the government decided in July to increase migrant laborer quotas for the construction sector
