Unionizing for Social Change – this was the slogan of the Workers Advice Center’s annual general meeting, held June 11, 2011 at the Minshar School of Arts in Tel Aviv and attended by representatives of workers committees and WAC branches from around the country
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 (see story). Following claims and pressure from WAC and the workers, the quarry agreed to some improvements.
Through WAC-Ma’an we learned that the Salit Quarries workers in Mishor Adumim began a general strike on June 16 because the management did not live up to its promise to sign the collective agreement at the last moment.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers just had our legal strike ended by back to work legislation imposed by the Canadian Government. During the period of our strike and lockout we were overwhelmed by messages of support and solidarity from around the globe. This reinforced our belief about the need for international solidarity.
The Workers Advice Center (WAC-Ma’an) unequivocally supports the social workers in their strike for improved employment terms. Their struggle highlights the distorted employment policies in Israel during the last 25 years. These policies are guided by a neo-liberal worldview which sees the organization of workers as a grave impediment which must be banished from society and the economy. At the center of the social workers’ struggle is the demand that employment terms for those employed via private NGOs and manpower agencies – about one third of all social workers (some 5,000 of 17,000) – be made equal to those employed directly by the Welfare Ministry and are thus public sector employees.
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.”
