http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=01/12/00&id=66026
Treatment of workers is a national shame
By Akiva Eldar
With Ofer Nimrodi facing trial over charges that he conspired to commit
murder, who has time for small change like the two female foreign
workers who serve the young newspaper tycoon? With all the trouble
he has landed in, Nimrodi would not have taken the chance of hiring
foreign workers illegally. Indeed, those who frequent his home say that
he got himself a permit.On its own, this fact should be more worrying
than the employment of foreign workers without a permit. If Nimrodi is
healthy enough to spend time in jail, why did he get a permit to employ
two foreign workers? In order to get a permit for foreign household
helpers (one, not two), paraplegics are required to prove annually that
they have not grown new legs.
On the face of things, what are two foreign maids when compared to
the serious charges against Nimrodi or the suspicion that President Ezer
Weizman accepted thousands of dollars not entirely in accordance with
the law? Politicians, among them government ministers, say that had the
proposal that came before the last Knesset to set up a parliamentary
investigative committee to look into the matter of foreign workers been
passed, the findings would have dwarfed the Nimrodi and Weizman
affairs. Billions of shekels circulate annually in a market that is run in
part by fat cats with connections to the establishment. People who have
a hard life or just plain suckers wait for months in order to secure a
permit to hire a foreign worker. People with lots of money in their
pockets, who know whom to pass it along to, expedite the procedures.
Comments made recently by the head of the Foreign Workers
Administration at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Efraim
Cohen, at a meeting with senior officials at the Foreign Ministry hint at
what politicians know and are keeping quiet. Cohen's explanation of the
inherent difficulty in passing a law for the protection of foreign workers
is that there is "a strong lobby - political and economic - of interested
individuals." Cohen added that this strong lobby, especially the
contractors and farmers, "prefers foreign workers, while the
government prefers hiring Palestinians." The foreign workers lobby
derives its power in part from Knesset members and senior politicos
whose families run large manpower companies.
And it is not just the human rights organizations, headed by Workers'
Line, that are helpless facing these politicos. The government
establishment itself also has not been able to step into the breach. The
efforts by the coordinator of activities in the territories, Yaakov "Mendi"
Or, to bring workers from the territories back to the field and building
sites are running up against brick walls. The director-general of the
Foreign Ministry, Eytan Bentsur, wrote to the director-general of the
Prime Minister's Office, Yossi Kucik, on September 13 about the "the
severe damage to Israel's image caused by the arrest and deportation
of foreign workers from the country." He recommended enforcing the
law on employers who exploit the workers and deny them their basic
rights.
Bentsur wrote, "Back at the beginning of 1999 ,[then Foreign] Minister
Ariel Sharon sent a written warning to the ministers of the interior, labor
and social affairs and public security but, to our regret, no real progress
has yet been made on this issue."
On December 9 Bentsur again wrote to Kucik about "the shameful
exploitation of foreign workers that brings disgrace upon Israeli society
and gives it a bad name in the world." He noted that the problems he
had enumerated in his previous letter, particularly the difficulty of
enforcing the law on employers, had not yet been solved and "there is a
need for the Prime Minister's Office and the government of Israel to
address this painful issue."
The market for foreign workers is controlled by the Interior Ministry,
which was in the hands of Shas for years, and the Ministry of Labor and
Social Affairs, which Shas holds to this day. On October 12, Health
Minister Shlomo Benizri stood in for Labor and Social Affairs Ministers
Eli Yishai at a Knesset debate on foreign workers. MK Zahava Gal-On
of Meretz related that there were 60 workers from Romania living near
the purification plant in Haifa Bay. In addition to the omnipresent terrible
stench, the workers are suffering from skin rashes, headaches and
stomachaches. Gal-On reported that members of the Haifa municipal
council who visited the site could not stay there for more than a 90
seconds. "And I'm talking about people who actually live there," she
said.
What did Benizri have to say? He joked, "They've probably become
used to it." And his colleague, Shas MK David Tal, who presided at the
meeting, said: "And even a hanged man flutters for a while, and then he
gets used to it and calms down." Tal's words are prescient: They
describe Israeli society's reaction to its country's treatment of its
foreign workers
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