Up into the 1980s mainly Arab Israelis and (despite the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967 and the accompanying security policy in Israel) labor from the Palestinian Territories had been employed in the construction industry. A well-unionized sector, it’s pension fund was the biggest in the Histadrut.
Already during the first Intifada (1987), to which Israel reacted with curfews and restrictive controls along the "green line" (thus far there is no border in the sense of a fixed state territory), it became more and more difficult for Palestinian workers to reach their jobs. In as much as it could develop anyhow, the economy within the Occupied Territories to a large extent depends on Israel, unemployment rates are about 50 per cent, as Hussein Fuquaha, member of the executive board of the PGFTU told us in Ramallah. For the most part the earnings comes from those working in Israel. Along with the Gulf War in 1991 the general travel permit implemented under Moshe Dayan in 1970 was annulled and replaced by a differentiated passport system. Since then Israel additionally uses the instrument of a complete closing of the borders in "situations of threat". According to the WAC, in these times, unemployment rates rise up to 65 per cent. Even on a "normal" day it is difficult for those who at least hold a travel and labor permit (i.e. married men from a certain age that is no longer "security relevant", sometimes 40 years, sometimes less) to get to their workplace: "flying checkpoints" can be set up any time which further complicate the, in any case, slow progress on the decrepit communication roads within the Territories, endless queues and lining up for hours at the regular checkpoints, arbitrary withholding of papers and so forth make it impossible to keep an appointment or simply to exit. Under those conditions a regular job cannot be maintained.
Many Israeli employers dismissed their Palestinian employees with which they had worked for decades. While in the mid-1990s there were about 120000 registered Palestinian employees (and about the same amount working "illegally") in Israel, by now this figure has dropped by half, as Fuquaha explicated. We, too, had our object lesson in the "lottery game" of exit and keeping appointments. At our meeting Fuquaha himself stood in for the PGFTU’s chairperson Saher Saad, who got caught in a universal closure. And Assaf Adiv, one of the heads of our delegation and national coordinator of the WAC, at our exit (!) from Ramallah was held at Kalandia checkpoint, for as an Israeli citizen he shouldn’t have entered for security reasons. His objections to the border guard that this was illogical led to his detainment, so that only in the evening he could leave the police station to which the border guards had brought him. At the time of our journey the universal closure prohibiting border traffic for Israelis and Palestinians alike was already lasting for more than a month: at first the pretext was the expected reaction to the murder of Sheik Yassin, then the Israeli Independence Day, eventually the Basketball finals …
Under the above mentioned conditions, PGFTU’s work doesn’t have much of a chance to succeed. It campaigns for the development of a social insurance system and for the realization of the labor legislation existing since 1993, against the opposition of the Palestinian employers lobby in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), who in spite of all alleged homogenous "national interests" of the Palestinians do not have an interest in the social security of its employees. Up until now Israel prevents the constitutional requirements for labor jurisdiction. On the other hand the PGFTU has submitted ten test cases to the Israeli court of justice with regard to compensation or re-employment of Palestinian workers who lost their jobs during the second Intifada because of the closure. This affects a total of 55000 employees.
But even taking legal action is difficult under the conditions of closure: About 1500 pending cases on breaches of the labor law were suspended because Palestinian witnesses couldn’t appear at court or got arrested. The unionists were particularly disappointed by the Histadrut. Since 1992 there is an agreement on mutual assistance wherein Histadrut pledged to help on issues concerning labor law and to pay a part of the fees to the PGFTU that – as a relic from it’s times as a national trade union – it collects automatically whenever a labor contract is signed. Since the second Intifada no money was transferred and there was "not a single sign of solidarity discernible", was the bitter conclusion of Fuquaha and his colleagues.