First published in 2008. Photos by Michael Kolchesky
“Mother” drives from her home in Jerusalem to the remote agricultural town of Qadima in the north of Israel. She parks her van next to a strawberry field and walks onto the mud in the cover of night. Hidden behind a potato factory, invisible from the isolated main road, there is a metal shipping crate that houses 15 Thai workers. When they see Mother trudge toward them, they come out, lift their hands in prayer positions and say, “Sawadi kop!”
It is winter and the weather is wet and cold, but many of the workers wear shorts and sandals. Some of them have the flu. Mother gives them medicine and warm winter clothes. The workers wipe down a chair and place it next to a table under a canopy. Before she takes a seat, Mother peers inside the crate. She tut-tuts and shakes her head, and her silver halo of hair puffs in the wind. “This is no good,” she says. “This is like an oven in the summer, and a refrigerator in the winter. You will become sick!”
Mother—who wishes her name to be withheld—is a volunteer representative of Kav La’Oved (Hebrew for Worker’s Hotline), Israel’s leading labor rights advocacy organization. With an annual budget of only $400,000 Kav La’Oved relies heavily on volunteers like Mother. According to their website, in 2004 the organization gave legal representation to over 2,500 workers and won over $800,000—twice its own budget—on their behalf.
Jane and Mary’s* story is typical of the cases Kav La’Oved takes on. These two workers from Sri Lanka came to Israel on the premise of becoming caregivers. Upon arrival, their passports were taken from them. They were watched over all day, and forced to work without rest, except to eat and shower. Their wages were withheld and they were confined in the houses where they worked. They feared deportation if they fled their employers. But they escaped anyway, and on the advice of aquaintances, stumbled into Kav La’Oved, where they were assigned a lawyer—an invaluable advocate for the women who could speak neither English nor Hebrew.
The workers at the Qadima strawberry farm get paid 95 shekels ($20.60) for an eight-hour workday and 13 shekels ($2.80) an hour for overtime. This is considerably less than the legal minimum wage of 17.93 shekels ($3.90) an hour. But at least they get paid on time. Attorney Anat Gonen, Kav La’Oved’s Thai worker specialist says agricultural workers are in a particularly vulnerable position. “With the Thais, they are so isolated,” she says. “They live in rural areas, and there is the language barrier. The Thai Embassy doesn’t help very much, although they are starting to put pressure on employers to pay their salaries, at least for the first year.”
Gonen first reached out to Thai laborers in 2003. In conjunction with social work students from Tel Hai College, she went into the field and presented the laborers with information on their legal rights. “They laughed,” she says. What good does knowledge of their rights do, the workers wanted to know, if there was nobody to enforce them?
In a 2001 report on human trafficking, Amnesty International classified Israel as a Tier 3 country—the lowest possible rating. It is illegal here to charge workers for job mediation. Nonetheless, the importation of foreign workers is a lucrative business. The 15 Thai workers in Qadima have all paid recruitment agencies up to $8,000 to secure their working visas. It will take them two years to pay off this debt—they are effectively indentured servants. For every foreign worker who shells out thousands of dollars to come into Israel, manpower agencies, employers and the Israeli government—in the form of service charges—get a cut of the money.
This puts laborers in a vulnerable position: It is more profitable to bring in fresh crops of foreign workers than to continue hiring the ones already in the country. Foreign workers have little job security. Without an employer, they become illegal residents, subject to arrest and deportation.
Hana Zohar, Kav La’Oved’s director and founder says, “Manpower agencies encourage employers to bring new workers from abroad because they don’t know their rights, so they are more quiet. And [the agencies] make money this way. Chinese workers pay the most—$12,000 to come to Israel. $4,000 goes to the agencies in China. The rest stays in Israel as black money.”
In 2005, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Knesset member Shlomo Benizri was indicted for helping himself to some of this black money. While he was Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, he granted government licenses to manpower agencies in exchange for money and favors, including free cleaning services from two Eastern European workers. Benizri advanced part of his bribe money to Rabbi Reuven Elbaz, his spiritual advisor.
The government agency that is responsible for overseeing labor issues in Israel is the Ministry of Industry Trade and Labor (MITL). But, as Gonen says, “The way it should be is instead of turning to us, workers would go to the labor office. But they don’t even employ translators.”
The MITL recently added a link to the Foreign Workers’ Rights Handbook on their website. Accessible in multiple languages, it is a breakdown of labor laws and includes contact information for advocacy organizations like Kav La’Oved and Physicians for Human Rights. But according to Zohar, the ministry put this link up only after pressure from her organization. Mother says, “It’s like we are knocking on doors, and the doors are always locked.”
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The area around Tel Aviv’s old central bus station is one of the poorest in the city. Junkies shoot up in the pedestrian tunnel that runs below the major intersection of Kikar Ha’Moshavot. Brothels and massage parlors line the streets.
Since the mid-‘90s, this neighborhood has become heavily populated with ethnic minorities: Ethiopian immigrants, foreign workers from the Philippines, China and Romania—the poorest sectors of Israeli society. The streets here are dense with Internet cafés and money-wiring shops. Kav La’Oved has branch offices in Haifa, Jerusalem and Bet Shemesh, but its headquarters are here in this south Tel Aviv neighborhood.
The organization’s founder and director, Hana Zohar, is a petite but stern woman with a salt and pepper pixie haircut. She was born in Israel in 1948, the same year as the founding of the country. Zohar said she once believed in the doctrine of the Jewish State as a haven for the dispossessed. When she became aware of Palestinian laborers working for minimal pay and living in poverty conditions, she says, “I realized this was not true.”
Zohar established Kav La’Oved in 1991 as an organization that would advocate for abused Palestinian workers. But two things happened in the early ‘90s that caused her to expanded her operation to accommodate foreign workers as well: A major wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union provided Israel with a new exploitable workforce; and in March 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin closed off the Palestinian territories in the name of security. 120,000 Palestinians who commuted from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to work in Israel’s agricultural and construction industries were instantly cut off from their jobs. The closure left a giant gap in Israel’s labor force. The country’s economy and businesses suffered.
In order to provide a cheap workforce to replace the vacated Palestinian laborers, Israel increasingly courted foreign workers. An “open sky” policy was implemented, allowing entry to an unlimited amount of laborers from countries like Thailand, the Philippines, China, Romania and Turkey.
But in 2002, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon effectively closed the skies. He enforced quotas, and around this time, the immigration police was formed to enforce deportations. The immigration police are notoriously heavy-handed. In 2005, they illegally conducted a midnight raid at a hospital for Alzheimer patients in search of illegal foreign caregivers. In a separate incident, immigration police beat a deaf-mute foreign worker to the point of unconsciousness, and one of its officers, Tal Dinar, was convicted of stabbing a Chinese worker in the stomach during an apartment raid.
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As of 2006, there was an estimated 300,000 foreign workers in Israel. According to a 2003 investigation by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), 65% of these workers are illegal.
In Israel, foreign workers’ visas used to be tied to the employer who brought them into the country. Often, workers became illegal because of forces beyond their control—the employer went out of business, the MITL revoked the employer’s permit to hire foreign workers, or the employer passed away. Workers who fled their employers because of abusive conditions were at the mercy of the immigration police.
The law was recently amended to let foreign workers change jobs. But employers have to first sign release forms. Kav La’Oved attorney Yuval Livnat told the Jerusalem Post that employers often illegally demand money in exchange for their signatures.
Foreign workers can fall into illegal status without even knowing it. Niran*, one of the Thai workers on the Qadima strawberry farm, used to work on a farm in the south of Israel. The ministry of labor inspected the conditions of foreign workers there, and advised the employer to raise the workers’ wages and improve their housing conditions.
Niran says his employer complied. The ministry revoked the farm’s license to hire foreigners anyway. In that moment, Niran and his colleages became illegal residents, but they were not told. The following month, the immigration police raided the farm in the dead of night. The workers were handcuffed and sent to jail, where they consulted with Kav La’Oved over the phone. With the organization’s help, Niran and his colleagues were released and relocated to other farms.
In 2004, Israel’s unemployment rate peaked at 10.7%. By the third quarter of 2005, the rate was down to 8.9%, giving Israel the sixth highest unemployment rate in the world. Analysts speculate that this statistic can be blamed on the prevalence of a black money economy—people being paid in cash “under the table.” It is estimated that 10% of wage earners don’t get pay slips, the documents that prove employment and wages received. A recent investigation by the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce found that 41% of all wage earners in Israel are paid below the minimum wage. Foreign workers, it seems, are not the only workers who suffer. They are just at the bottom of a broken labor market.
*Names have been changed
