In April 2004 union and labor activists of 13 European countries were invited to catch up on site on the working conditions in the construction industry as a “test case†for the overall labor market situation and the employment policies in Israel. The journey had been initiated and organized by the Workers Advice Centre (WAC; Arabic: ma’an).
Above all the WAC supports the union organizing of groups that are subject to extraordinary severities and discriminations in the labor market: Arab workers in Israel, labor from the Palestine territories as well as migrant workers from other countries (especially from Asia and Eastern Europe). On the basis of this seemingly very specific topic it is possible to discuss problems that are of increasing importance not only in the national context of Israel and the Israel/Palestine-conflict, but for union’s representation of interests and accordingly the labor movement worldwide: the heightened competition that wage laborers are facing due to internationalized, racist segmented and precarized labor markets.
One of the central questions is: How to think of abolishing the competition between foreign and domestic workers (or in between them) without restricting oneself to a national or “ethnic†framework and reacting with the corresponding claim for immigration restrictions? We present a longer report about the journey of the union activists and the experiences the WAC has made, written by Kirsten Huckenbeck (Transnationals Information Exchange, TIE; express-magazine, Germany), as well as presentations of several Organizations in Israel (WAC, Kav La’Oved), which support the (self-)organizing process of migrant and precarious workers.
This report has been translated by Dagmar Fink and is available for download as a PDF (308K).
