Israel: Rush to replace Palestinian and migrant agricultural and construction workers raises concerns of further deterioration of "abhorrent" work conditions
"After mass exodus, Israel's rush to replace foreign workers raises human rights concerns"
During an investigative trip to Israel in 2014, Nick McGeehan spoke with a shattered Thai worker who had recently seen a colleague killed when a rocket hit a remote farm field just north of the nation's border with Gaza. The worker said his team had been told to stay on the job even as the barrage continued during the war that year, McGeehan recalled...
"He was furious that they'd been forced to work in the fields while everyone else was hiding in shelters."
Nearly a decade later, the foreign labour sector in Israel has again been caught in the crossfire of another war. Officials say the latest conflict has led to the loss of tens of thousands of workers from Thailand and Gaza, creating a labour shortage human rights experts fear will leave replacement workers at risk of exploitation as Israel seeks to quickly fill gaps left by the fleeing and the dead...
"[Israel] saw how convenient it is because its workers who come for limited time, they get the minimum wage and their accommodations are quite cheap because they're living in poor housing, working long days," said Assia Ladizhinskaya, a spokesperson for Kav LaOved, an Israeli human rights group.
A number of reports over the years have detailed the "abhorrent" conditions these workers face. One by Human Rights Watch in 2015 detailed how workers in the agricultural industry toiled for long hours well beyond the legal maximum, and stayed in makeshift housing with little health care or workers' rights — all while being paid far below minimum wage.
"Both the working conditions and living conditions that I saw were appalling," said McGeehan, who now runs his own organization, FairSquare, to investigate human rights abuses...
The Israeli government has estimated that 10,000 farm workers have since left the country, while as many as 120,000 Palestinians had to abandon their Israeli construction work after the nation revoked their work permits as a result of the war...
In construction, Israel has already begun looking to countries like India and Sri Lanka to recruit replacement workers.
The Israeli Builder Association — created to represent various sectors across the nation's construction sector — said in a statement that it hoped to bring as many as 100,000 workers from India into the country to replace Palestinians whose Israeli permits were cancelled...
McGeehan, whose organization recently issued a statement imploring India to ignore Israel's call for workers, says the exploitation of foreign workers is an international problem that can only be solved if nations rethink their migration and labour policies with a willingness to overhaul the system on which their economies have come to depend...