Vol. 80/No. 1      January 4, 2016

 

Construction deaths of Palestinians in
Israel show need to organize unions

 
 
In November five construction workers fell to their deaths in a single week in Israel. Over the last five years, official government records report 184 have died in falls. The overwhelming majority are Arab citizens of Israel, Arabs from the West Bank or immigrant workers, mostly from China, Russia, eastern Europe or Eritrea.

The dangers that construction workers face in Israel and the United States are “strikingly similar, only with local variants, Palestinians instead of Latinos,” Hadas Tagari told the Militant Dec. 18 by phone from Hod Hasharon. In September 2014 the government increased the quota for Palestinian construction workers from the West Bank by 5,000.

Roughly 30 construction workers die on the job every year and some 6,000 are injured. There are only 17 government safety inspectors for 12,000 construction sites, according to a recent report by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

“I got up on the morning of Nov. 10 and saw that the previous day three construction workers were killed,” Tagari said. She formed the Coalition for Fighting Construction Accidents, which includes Kav LaOved (Workers’ Hotline), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights and the Workers Advice Center.

The Histadrut, the largest union federation in the country, has contracts with some big construction companies, but most work is contracted out and 75 percent or more of those workers are unorganized.

The bosses intimidate undocumented workers and keep them from speaking out about dangerous work conditions or forming a union, Shay Cohen, an organization secretary of Koach La Ovdim (Workers Power), the second largest union federation in Israel, said by phone from Givatayim.

“Only unionization can solve the problem in the long term,” he said. “We’ve had some success organizing crane operators who are mostly Russian immigrants and Arab citizens of Israel. But that is just the very beginning of what is needed.”

Deaths on the job are rarely reported in the press and usually without the names of the workers who die, Tagari said.

“In recent decades not one contractor has ever paid for a worker’s death with prison time,” Haaretz reported.
 
 
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