Bedein - Let Their People Go:

Why Glorify the Quasi Enslavement of Migrant Workers ?

David Bedein..
Israel Resource News Agency..
Center for Near East Policy Research..
01 May '12..

May 1: The worker’s holiday. Placards distributed by Israel’s national labor federation, also known as the Histadrut, calls on workers in Israel this year to march on May 1 under the banner. WE ARE WORKERS, NOT SLAVES.

Israel’s workers now compete with a non Jewish migrant worker population of Israel who are enticed by contractors to work in quasi-slave-like conditions, below minimum wage, with no social or medical benefits.

Indeed, non Jewish migrant workers are easy prey for easy profits.

And as of this Israel Independence Day, the migrant worker population has reached 163,615 people, a figure which includes the children of the migrant workers.

Across the globe, civil liberties organizations and their allies in the media fight to put an end to the phenomenon of the exploitation of migrant workers who are paid dirt wages with no benefits. Indeed, a CBS documentary that aired when I was a boy, fifty years ago, HARVEST OF SHAME, did wonders to shake the conscience of people throughout the United States to the horrific working conditions for migrant workers in American agriculture.

Yet in Israel today, civil liberties organizations and their allies in the media fight for migrant workers to remain in such conditions in Israel.Their only worry that the migrant workers may be sent back to their home countries. What civil liberties organizations and their allies in the media have ignored is what the contractors who exploit the migrant workers have also hurt working person in Israel who would like to make an honest living.

When my younger son finished the IDF three years ago, he was ready to take any working job, so long as he would earn something, before he decided where he would go for advanced studies. He went from place to place, shocked that the wages offered were below the minimum wage, with no social or medical benefits. What he heard from contractor after contractor was that they have “adjusted” their pay scale to the migrant workers, who seemingly can live below the minimum wage, with no social or medical benefits. One contractor actually offered my son a wage of 17 shekels an hour, ten hours a day, with no benefits. A migrant worker indeed took the job instead.

Viewpoint:'White' Israel and its migrant workers

Carmel Gould
Just Journalism
20 July '10

The picture painted by Mya Guarnieri in her Guardian Comment is free article, ‘Children are just Israel's latest victims’ is stark. Readers unfortunate enough not to know better would doubtless reach two false conclusions: first, that Israel treats its migrant worker population exceptionally badly; and second, – and perhaps the most demonstrably untrue – that Israel is a ‘white’ country, which does not like non-white people.

The trigger for these accusations is a decision by Israel in 2009 to deport back to their countries of origin a group of illegal migrant workers, including up to 1,200 children who were born in Israel. The story’s headline, standfirst and opening paragraph together implied that the children were to be sent away alone but the second paragraph actually admitted that the minors were in fact due to be sent back ‘along with their families’.

Guarnieri’s central complaint is that the children were born in Israel and that sending them to their parents’ countries of origin would be an act of ‘inhumanity’ completely out of step with civilised behaviour. This provides the context for her accusation that the policy is born of a racist country.

But deporting migrant children controversially is by no means unique to Israel. The European Union has gone out of its way to make legal its planned deportation of thousands of lone Afghan asylum-seeking minors, including by committing to build ‘reception centres’ in war-torn Afghanistan ‘that can provide care for minors when the family cannot be found’. The Guardian itself reported these measures last month when the UK announced that it would be participating in the scheme, although the issue of race was not mentioned.

(Read full story)

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