Employers in the restaurant, commerce, and service industries will be required to apportion money for social welfare and the provision of pensions for migrant workers, the Knesset Labor Committee decided earlier this week. Following the labor shortage caused by the war and the ban on employing Palestinian workers from the territories, the Knesset recently allowed the employment of foreign workers in these fields for the first time. But the agriculture industry, which has employed foreign workers for much longer, is not included in the requirement.
The apportionment mechanism is used by the state both to enforce the payment of the full pension and social welfare of migrant workers and to encourage the workers to leave the country on time so that they can redeem the accumulated funds for their benefit. The requirement to set aside funds for pensions and social welfare was applied to the construction and nursing industries as early as 2016, and later this obligation was also imposed on employers of migrant workers in hospitality, industry, and the nursing institutions of the Ministries of Health and Welfare.
Following the government’s recent decision to allow the employment of up to 2,000 foreign workers in the restaurant industry and up to 13,500 foreign workers in the trade and services sectors, Labor Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur submitted regulations for the committee’s approval to extend the state deposit fund obligation to these two branches as well. Government ministries requested that the regulation be approved for a full year, but the committee approved it only for six months, until March 1, 2025.
The Israeli workers’ rights organization Kav LaOved expressed its support for the legislation. But it reiterated its opposition to employing migrant workers in these fields, which, it said, “could be an upset for generations, both for the migrant workers themselves and for their Israeli colleagues.”
Kav LaOved also emphasized that the regulations referring to two completely new industries for migrant labor do not also refer to the agriculture industry—the industry that allows the highest number of migrant workers and that has never had a similar regulation to set aside funds.
“This is an industry in which the cap for hiring migrant workers was recently increased to 70,000 workers, some of whom have arrived under the payment of prohibited brokerage fees due to the government’s decision to allow migrant workers to be brought in via private channels,” Kav LaOved said. “Some of them are required to work in areas at risk of rocket fire, and others are now left without work due to slanderous generalizations from the employers’ representatives towards Indian and Sri Lankan workers. This is a large industry and it is filled with rights violations, one of the most prominent and well-known of which is non-payment of pensions and legal compensation upon termination of employment, particularly when the employee is supposed to leave Israel.”
Kav LaOved said that the government has already determined several times that the obligation to set aside state deposit funds should be applied in this industry as well.
In December 2018, regulations mandating setting employers in the agriculture sector to set aside such funds were supposed to be discussed in the Labor Committee, but the finance minister at the time, Moshe Kahlon, withdrew the discussion due to pressure from the farmers.
