However, the Israeli government doesn’t experience to much difficulties in recollecting it’s former interest in cheap labor from the Occupied Territories as became apparent in it’s varied handling of Palestinian workers. " "The Palestinians are our true foreign workers"", a member of Yuval Rachlewski’s advisory team said. With this he contravened the recent program of Finance Minister Netanyahu ""Israeli work first"" at the same time.
The need for labor, increasing due to the closure policy on the one hand and the projected housing demand after the arrival of about one million Russian immigrants at the begin of the 1990s on the other hand, could not to be satisfied with Israelis given the currently proposed wages. Pressurized by building contractors and agricultural entrepreneurs the government began to introduce quotas for these two sectors at first. In the course of the restructuring the social insurance, recruitments in the nursing sector followed, for the tremendous need for private nursing staff, that often has to be available to its "clients" round-the-clock, could also not be supplied by Israeli labor. While it is the legislator’s business to define the quotas for work permits (though in the past they were often attuned to the hardly verifiable demand reported by the companies), the market for migrant workers, i.e. the recruitment and completion of the contracts, is definitely in the hands of private employment agencies.
Dr Roy Wagner of Kav La’Oved, an NGO who in 2003 received the Knesseth’s "Quality of Life Award" for its dedication to the rights of migrant workers and the precariously employed in Israel, explained how the system of work permits functions: the employees are assigned a work permit which binds them to a certain employer (in Israel this practice, that in several sectors is not unusual in Germany as well, is called "bonded" and respectively "shackling labor"). In between are the temporary employment agencies who conclude the work contract with the employer assigned the permit. Since the visa is connected to the work permit, it is not possible to change jobs without becoming "illegal". But not only legally are workers "tied" to their employers: The majority of employers in the construction industry and in agriculture take away (i.e. confiscate) the passports of their employees, though this is illegal and can be prosecuted with a sentence up to one year.
This practice of "bonded labor" affects not only the – legally also for migrants provided for – right to union organizing, it precludes complaints to the employer and therewith de facto means ""slave labor"", as Dr Yossi Dahan of the ADVA Social Research Center explained. A fundamental right of a civil liberty of Western societies, namely the ""free choice of employment"" and the ""freedom to sell one’s labor" " were thus annulled, he stated. The consequences he spelt out, using a study of his institute according to which 68 per cent of the legally employed migrants do not receive compulsory minimum wages. In talks with workers at a construction site in Tel Aviv, where Turkish employees of a temporary employment agency and Arab workers organized by the WAC and who had contracts with the building contractor were working together in a column, these impressions were confirmed: the Turkish comrades knew neither who they could turn to in case of sickness nor whether they do have health insurance. And: their wages per hour were about a third less than that of their Arab colleagues.
For Dahan this meant making migrant labor more expensive by bringing their rights into line with those of the nationals. For him the issue of acknowledging equal rights for migrants was directly related to a criticism of the "ideological construction" of the "Jewish state". Rather than the idea of a homogenous society the fact of a mixed society should be recognized – this would also apply for dealing with Arab Israelis and Palestinians who were having the status of "migrants in their own country".
Whereas Wagner’s criticism focused on the trafficking in human beings. The recruitment of migrant labor were – even before the known factors that make their utilization appear so profitable and even if there is no real employment – becoming the core business in the ""big business of trafficking in human beings"", because of mediation fees. The temporary employment agencies share this business with the authorities in the countries of origin (above all China, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria) – and with the companies. While mainly big building companies sell available permits to other companies or manipulate their needs so that they are able to make an extra-profit from the trading of surplus labor (and thereby put the "sold" migrants at the risk of illegality), some of the governments of origin participate in collecting fees from the temporary agencies. Dr Leonard Hammer, lawyer and expert in the implementation of international human rights and labor protection conventions in Israeli law, pointed at contracts in which the Chinese and Romanian government were receiving premiums up to 500 Euros per person from the personnel agencies and thereby he confirmed the findings of an investigation by Kav La’Oved. The agencies, in turn, charge the migrants between 2000 and 15,000 US dollars for their "efforts", reported Sigal Rozen from the Hotline for Migrant Workers, whose staff sees to the legal and social assistance for the increasing number of deportation refugees. Mind you: This is about the "drawbacks" of legal labor migration within the framework of a state under the rule of law. This, again, poses the question of a legal handling against such practices.