(3) Exploitation of Foreign Workers in
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'I never saw such fear'
Each year thousands of foreign workers are invited to
promise of good jobs and a new life. The reality is grimly different - they are
treated like slave labour, live in squalor and, if they fall sick, can
face
deportation. Rachel Shabi reports
Chen and Wang sit in their solicitor's office in
dressed in their best clothes but look worn and crumpled. The two Chinese men
are used to sitting indoors, waiting and hiding. They are each in debt to the
tune of $10,000, the money they paid for a permit for manual work in the
Israeli
construction industry. They came to
waiting for them at the airport as had been promised.
Their permits, made out
for the catering industry, didn't allow them to work.
Chen, 51, and Wang, 44,
both support wives and children in
brothers and sisters. "I am missing my families. I don't know when I will
see
them again," says Wang. "I can't go home because I don't have money. It's a
mess, a mess. I want a job, that's all."
Those words could have been spoken by many thousands
of people in
several different tongues. The country is now home to an estimated 250,000
"foreign" workers - they are never referred
to as "migrants" - because only Jews
can officially immigrate to
permits, for which they incur vast debts on the promise of making good money
(relatively speaking) in
promised work is a complete fiction, or their employment could
be more
accurately described as indentured slavery. And
always hanging over them is the
threat of deportation.
"They live like animals," says Limor Chitiat, a solicitor with the
Hotline for
Migrant Workers (HMW), which offers legal support and promotes civil rights for
foreign workers and victims of trafficking in
always looking behind them, they cannot sleep. They did not take out these loans
[for work permits] from a bank - if they are deported, they will be
killed."
When she first met Chen and Wang, "I never saw such fear in anyone's eyes.
I
never want to see it again."
The two survive on odd, illegal jobs and the charity of friends. They are able
to stay in the country on a month-by-month basis, while the police investigate
the people that sold them fraudulent permits - but such protection is almost
unheard of and, as a result, Wang and Chen fear they could be
deported at any
time.
That there are migrant workers in
country's relationship with
Rabin, citing security reasons, legislated that the 100,000 or so Palestinians
working in
agriculture and catering industries lost a ready source of cheap labour, so the
government agreed that 5,000 workers from
the gap. Employed mostly in construction, they were initially
considered
inferior to their Palestinian predecessors. But their
advantages quickly became
apparent. "When Palestinian workers came to us, we thought their situation
couldn't be worse," says Hanna Zohar, dire ctor of Kav La'Oved (the
worker's
line), which provides legal aid to disadvantaged workers. "Then we
realised that
people could be exploited much, much more." Unlike Palestinians, migrant
workers
do not know their rights and have incurred heavy debts to reach
be made to work under any terms.
The number of work permits issued by the government has now reached around
100,000 a year. And as more workers arrive in
after case of migrants working too long, too hard, for too little or no pay and
in dangerous environments. "The policy in
encourages abuse," says Shevy Korzen, director of the HMW. "But the
most
exploited workers can be found in the construction sector, followed by
agriculture. In the care-giving sector, there may be less cases of abuse but
the
cases are often very severe."
One Chinese worker, Lu Zang Kao, described conditions at a Tel Aviv
construction
site to the hotline: "We worked at least 10 hours a day. I was living with
other
workers in very harsh conditions in a caravan site. We were
told that anyone
using a mobile phone would be deported back to
leave the building site, even after working hours. And three times a day, all
of
us were counted to make sure that no one ran away."
Such conditions are commonplace. In most cases dealt with by the HMW, migrant
workers have not been paid at all for their first two months'
work and then paid
well below the minimum wage of $650 a month. Frequently they are docked
wages
for using mobile phones, or for leaving the site without permission, or lose
two
days' pay after taking one day off sick. They sleep in overcrowded flats, tents
or caravans, and live on bags of rice for months. And
if they complain, about
anything, the answer is always the same: do you want to be deported?
What makes this situation so bad is that workers are "bound" by their
permits to
their employers: they are not allowed to work for
anyone else and the minute
they leave the employer - for whatever reason - they are considered illegal.
"If
he is fired, becomes ill, resigns, is mistreated, finds other work, or is
transferred to another place of employment, he becomes an illegal worker,
liable
to arrest, imprisonment and deportation," says Sigal Rozen, spokeswoman for the
HMW.
The binding policy has, according to Rozen, laid a golden egg for Israeli
firms.
"So many workers said they gave the money for permits to representatives
of
their Israeli employers who met them at the airport," she says. "It
is not a
secret; everyone knows that Israeli companies make money out of the work
permits." These cost the workers between $5,000 and $13,000, for which
they are
promised at least the minimum wage and employmen t for two years.
But while thousands of new workers are legally invited into
equal numbers are being thrown out. Employers will try to deport a
"runaway"
worker, since they use up one of the company's allocated permits. A few years
ago, "wanted" signs were seen all over
building sites offering rewards of up to
$3,000 for information on the whereabouts of runaways. By 2002, however, there
was a shift in policy. Two years into the second Palestinian intifada,
unemployment was high, and the economy in tatters and the national mood changed
towards foreign workers. Never mind that they had been
officially invited to
work in
the country, stealing jobs, stealing women and bringing diseases. A migrant
hotline was set up, "a toll-free number that you can call and say there is
a
migrant worker living next door," says Korzen. "And people do that -
they call
it good citizenship." The calls reach the immigration authority, set up in
2002
to deal with the "problem" of illegal workers. This authority met its
quota of
removing 50,000 illegal workers in its first year of operation, and so the
quota
was doubled for the next year, and met again.
By far the largest deportation sweep was of the once thriving migrant community
in Neve Sha'anan in south Tel Aviv. Many of these migrants were officially
illegal, in the sense that they arrived in the early 90s or before on holiday
permits and remained, setting up churches and schools in Tel Aviv. They came
from poor countries to build better lives. "They've gone, most of them
have been
deported," says Korzen. "We are talking about people who have been
here for 10
to 15 years. You saw so many Chinese, African and Romanian faces in that
district. Now the few that remain are hiding, afraid to walk the streets."
What the plight of this particular migrant group exposes is the relationship
full citizenship. Israeli-born children of long-term migrants are a conundrum -
some have been deported; others remain and are known as "invisible
children".
There are several hundred such children in
have grown up absorbing Israeli culture, speak only Hebrew and want to serve in
the Israeli army. But the state does not recognise these
children; they are not
entitled to ID cards, medical cover, access to universities or work permits.
Emanuel Srisorin, 26, was born to a Filipino mother and a Thai father. "I
know
everything there is to know about Judaism, I am part of the culture and I feel
Israeli," he says. "But everything works through religion - it
doesn't matter if
you were born here or not." Srisorin attended school alongside many
"olim
hadashim " - new Jewish migrants who enjoy full,
automatic citizenship. He and
his brother, Juhn, are appealing for residency through the supreme
court. If the
case fails, the brothers will have to leave; they have never been to
the
leave
In its harsh relations with the Palestinian people, the Israeli government has
always cited security reasons as justification. "But with migrant workers,
it is
nothing to do with security. It is about people who are weak - and not
Jewish,"
says Zohar. "You cannot behave in an ugly way to only one group of people.
You
start with one population but tomorrow it is another."