Kav La’Oved, the Israeli organization that advocates for workers’ rights, is concerned that a snowball effect caused by the war may lead to increased dependence on migrant labor and diminished rights for all workers in Israel.
“We are seeing many political pressures and the beginning of a trend,” Elad Kahana, head of the Kav La’Oved legal division, told Davar.
The main factor influencing these trends is the decision to block the entry of Palestinian workers into Israel following the outbreak of the war, the implementation of which created an immediate massive shortage of workers. Before the war, approximately 120,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza worked in Israel, mainly in the fields of construction, manufacturing, and agriculture. Today, only about 6,000 Palestinian workers are allowed to enter Israel and only in areas that are designated as essential.
Due to this shortage, the government made the unusual decision to raise the cap on the number of migrant workers in agriculture and construction and to allow the recruitment of migrant workers from countries without bilateral agreements with Israel. For the past six months, employers and government ministers have demanded that the restrictions be eased even further.
In May, the government formed a committee tasked with making decisions on all issues pertaining to migrant workers. So far, the committee has approved a sharp increase on the cap on permits for migrant workers in agriculture (from 50,000 to 70,000 workers), industry (from 3,000 to about 13,000 workers), tourism (from 1,000 to nearly 7,000 workers), and nursing facilities. The committee allowed some of these workers to be brought in without any regulatory oversight of how they were recruited. They also established for the first time the possibility of bringing nearly 20,000 migrant workers to new industries such as transportation infrastructure, renovations, restaurants, cleaning, building and infrastructure services, wholesale and retail trade (including transportation), garages, and event halls.
“This committee is supposed to discuss the issue of caps on migrant workers and how they are brought to Israel, with a very broad ability for self-interpretation in relation to the scope of its powers,” Kahana explained. “Its discussions are not viewable or open to the public, so the feeling is that only those who already have connections to its members, and in our opinion these are mainly employers, can lobby the decisions. The idea is to bring as many migrant workers as possible to as many sectors as possible in as little time as possible, without thinking things through.”
For example, the committee recognizes any industry that was previously open to Palestinian workers as an industry that is allowed to employ migrant workers. “The committee determined that [the restaurant industry] is not a new sector for employing migrant workers, supposedly because it has already been approved in the past to employ non-Israeli workers, but there is a very big difference between a Palestinian worker and a migrant worker,” Kahana said.
Israel’s policy on Palestinian workers was designed with considerations including security and employment rates in the Palestinian Authority. Kahana emphasized the different needs of Palestinian workers, who return to their homes in the Palestinian territories each night and mainly on Palestinian services, from those of foreign workers. Foreign workers “need to be provided with health insurance, to ensure that they understand their rights, and that safety instructions are available in their language, which is not necessarily spoken in Israel,” Kahana said. “Is the country prepared to house tens of thousands of migrant workers suddenly? Is the healthcare industry prepared to treat them? Are the employers prepared to bear the costs involved? It’s not a chess set where you can just switch one piece out for another.”
Kahana said that the conversion of permits from Palestinian workers to migrant workers won’t actually help those who employed Palestinian workers, suggesting that only those who didn’t previously employ Palestinians will use the new permits.
His claim is that there are those waiting to jump on the bandwagon. “The cleaning and retail sectors for example, which did not employ migrant workers before the war, had previously requested to do so but were not approved,” he explained. “Restauranteurs justify their need for migrant workers by saying that local workers demand higher wages, which raises the fear that wage erosion of the Israeli worker is the real goal. The dam is breached, and many employers see migrant workers as an opportunity to lower costs, though hiring a migrant worker should be more expensive than hiring an Israeli worker.”
After bringing migrant workers into a given industry, employers will then try to exploit them, Kanaha said. “This is a vulnerable population and it is de-facto possible to pay them less and take advantage of them, and experience proves that this will happen,” he explained. “Experience also shows that an industry that opens up to migrant workers will only become more and more dependent on them and will demand more migrant workers. It is very difficult to push the wheel backwards.”
One of the things that concerns Kav La’Oved is the question of the nitty gritty—not only how many migrant workers will be brought in, but also the mechanisms for recruiting them and from which countries. For the past few years, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice have promoted recruitment of workers through bilateral agreements that include ways of screening the prospective workers for professional knowledge as well as mechanisms to ensure workers’ rights are protected and to prevent recruiters from charging outrageous brokerage fees. During the war, though, the state increased the ability to recruit migrant workers through private channels instead of as part of international agreements.
In agriculture, the government approved recruitment of up to 5,000 workers through private channels for a period of 90 days. “I’d estimate that about 2,500-3,000 workers came from all kinds of countries, especially from Malawi, India, and Thailand, while at the same time, the agreements we had with those countries were frozen for the same period,” Kahana said. “We at Kav La’Oved are already seeing issues with the workers who came here. We know, for example, that the workers from India were forced to pay high brokerage fees and ended up coming here with massive debt. These workers who don’t speak English or Hebrew and lack translations to their languages, and it seems that many farmers here don’t want to hire migrant workers, so they have little ability to move between employers, and all this is in an industry that has a record of rights violations against migrant workers.”
Israel recently signed a new bilateral agreement with the Sri Lankan government to bring agricultural workers. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs refuses to reveal the content of the agreement, so it is difficult to assess how well it protects the workers.
The worker shortage is significantly larger in the construction sector, because it was more reliant on Palestinian workers. In contrast to agriculture, there were no volunteer initiatives or assistance from Israeli workers following the outbreak of the war. Before October 7, Israel had bilateral agreements regarding construction workers with three countries—China, Moldova, and Ukraine. Ukrainian workers stopped coming to Israel after the war with Russia broke out, and China froze its deal with Israel at the onset of the war here.
Following the outbreak of the war, the Israeli government approved private recruitment outside of the agreements of up to 20,000 workers, about one third of what the new agreements with Sri Lanka and India allow.
“We only learn retroactively which countries workers come from,” Kahana explained. “Among the construction workers who came, we are meeting many who don’t speak English. How is the worker at the construction site supposed to properly communicate with his manager who is responsible for everyone’s safety? We’ve already spoken to workers who came through private channels and paid about $6,000 in order to work here. It bothers me when we’re talking about dangerous jobs like construction which claims the lives of over 30 people here every year. A worker with such debt will have a harder time returning home if, for example, they are injured in a workplace accident.”
Currently, the employment of migrant workers in the construction sector is only possible through personnel corporations, a model which, over the years, has allowed the government greater oversight. However, since the war, the number of licensed corporations has more than tripled, which raises concern at Kav La’Oved about the government’s ability to properly supervise them. This comes alongside demands from contractors to recruit and hire migrant workers themselves without a middleman.
The industrial sector was approved to bring about 2,000 workers to Israel through private channels. “These are not huge numbers, but unlike in the past, when the private recruitment of industrial workers was only approved for countries with a similar GDP to Israel, now it has been decided to remove this condition, meaning that that the workers will be coming from countries with weaker economies, and thus the workers will be more vulnerable to exploitation,” Kahana said.
Alongside the increase in the number of foreign workers, the government decided to add more positions to the enforcement agencies entrusted with their rights in the Ministry of Labor and the Population and Immigration Authority. Kahana pointed out that adding more positions in already understaffed agencies without also finding ways to hire more people to fill those positions will help no one.
“We also see that today most of the enforcement efforts are done in the big cities, and not, for example, in the remote agricultural settlements, and even when violations are found, it is rare that the employment permits are revoked,” Kahana said. “The enforcement is not very effective, and we have already had cases where the state itself had no way to communicate with workers and they called us to ask if we have interpreters for the languages they speak. Additionally, workers who arrive with debt and without real ability to switch employers will not complain to nor cooperate with the enforcement agencies that are supposed to protect them.”
The Knesset recently passed a preliminary reading of a bill that would deprive migrant workers employed in nursing homes of their right to a pension. “These proposals are not new, but they are taking advantage of what it means to work many years in difficult and undesirable jobs in a foreign country during a war,” he said. “It is clear that more employers, certainly those who are now given the opportunity to hire migrant workers and who are seeking to lower employment costs, will request this as well. The needs of nursing home patients are completely understandable and the state must help them—but the proper way is to provide financial assistance that will allow them to live with dignity and employ workers with dignity. There is a contradiction in the demands of the current situation, that from one side employers want to hire more workers with better training and higher competence, and from the other side they are only reducing their rights. Good workers are attracted to good conditions.”
According to Kahana, Israel is in the midst of a paradigm shift on the role of migrant workers in the country. “At the moment, we’re talking about demands and proposals, a big part of which is still not discussed in the open, but that’s the direction,” he said. “It won’t happen in a day or with one decision, it will happen in steps. What’s scary is the slow process. I hope we don’t wake up in the future and find ourselves like Dubai, an economy based on workers with no rights.”
