Vol. 73/No. 18      May 11, 2009

At least 40 Palestinian workers were given pink slips March 29 after the state-owned railroad announced new rules requiring that crossing guards be Israeli army veterans. While most Jewish workers are required to serve in the army, Israeli Arabs are exempt, and few, if any, do.

The guards, who are unarmed, work as lookouts at rail crossings to prevent collisions between trains and vehicles. About half of the 260 guards are Palestinians. Almost all the train crews are Jewish. Some Jewish workers who never joined the army could also be fired.

Many of the guards started working in 2006 after five people were killed and 80 injured when a train collided with a car at a crossing. They are hired through an employment agency and make little more than minimum wage.

At first Israel Railways said it was instituting the new rules to provide "opportunities" for young Israeli army veterans. But after workers filed suit challenging the discriminatory firings, the company changed its story. According to Haaretz, the company now claims that "mistakes" by workers prompted them to "improve the level of supervision."

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, filed a brief in the Labor Court backing the Palestinian workers. "Every day we get more calls from Railway workers asking us for help on this case," Adalah attorney Sawsan Zaher said in a phone interview.

On April 22 some 50 people, including workers threatened with dismissal, demonstrated in front of the Labor Court, she said. "They have received informal solidarity from some of their Jewish coworkers and from a Kibbutz movement which is close to the Histradrut." The Histradrut, the largest union federation in Israel, has not made any public statements about the case.

The temporary injunction against firing the workers is a "victory, but not exactly a huge victory," Wehbe Badarne, director of Sawt el-Amel, the Laborer's Voice, told the Militant. "The workers are still working, but where they used to work five or six days a week, now they have been cut back to two or three days."

"We are demanding that they be kept working full time and that their work conditions be improved," he said. "Sometimes they have no place to sit to eat their lunch, no place with air conditioning, no place to go to relax on their breaks."

"You don't need military experience to do this job. We don't carry a gun," Abad Taya, one of the Palestinian crossing workers, said in a phone interview. "We just report on what is going on. We use a walkie-talkie; sometimes we call the train driver and tell him to be careful."

"Some of my Jewish coworkers say that anyone who has worked here a long time should be allowed to stay. But it's not about length of time, it's about principles. This new rule is discriminatory."

Assad Salam works both as an elementary school teacher and a railroad guard to make ends meet. "We just want to work, like everybody else," he told the Militant.

On April 19, while the rail workers were at a Labor Court hearing, instructors at Open University—the largest in the country, with 40,000 students—went on strike. The university hires only 70 full-time instructors; the rest, some 1,300, are hired only a semester at a time.

The state-funded Open University has 50 branches across the country, including in Nazareth, a predominantly Arab city in northern Israel.
 
 
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