Asia

Forty-five Indian construction workers have been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment under charges of holding illegal gatherings, vandalism, and violating public security following their participation in a strike last year for better working conditions.

The ITUC strongly protests against the verdict of the Dubai Criminal Court, a verdict that constitutes a strong violation of Convention 87 on freedom of association. According to the ITUC, Head Judge Jassem wanted to create a precedent and send a strong message to workers “who resort to illegal methods to get their rights from employers.”

Migrant workers television (MWTV) from South Korea reported today about following latest alarming development: "In the midst of the increasing crackdown on migrant workers, MTU (Migrant Worker's Trade Union) President (Kajiman), Vice president (Raju) and General Secretary (Masum) were all arrested at 9:30 am this morning (November 27) in front of their homes/workplaces. They were arrested without any formal charges and are being held at detention center in Cheongju.."

China Labour Bulletin wholeheartedly adds its voice to the local and international condemnation of the recent attacks on a migrant workers' centre in Shenzhen, and calls for the local police to thoroughly investigate the case and bring the perpetrators to justice.

The Dagongzhe Centre in the Longgang district of Shenzhen has been vandalized and staff intimidated by groups of thugs in three separate incidents over the last two months, the most serious of which occurred on 20 November, when Dagongzhe lawyer, Huang Qingnan, was attacked and grievously injured by two men with knives. The attackers escaped and a week later Huang was still in a serious condition in hospital.

Amnesty International has published a report on the situation of migrant workers in China: "Internal migrant workers in China are paying the cost of the country’s economic "miracle". Most find themselves denied their rights -- shut out of the healthcare system and state education, living in appalling, overcrowded conditions and routinely exploited by their employers. An estimated 150-200 million Chinese rural workers are currently living and working in cities and that number is expected to continue to grow. While they make up the majority of the population in some cities, they are treated as an urban underclass discriminated against under the hukou (household registration) system, which requires them to register with local authorities as temporary residents."

Laborers, labor union activists, unionists, academicians and mass organizations in Turkey are organizing The First International Labor Film And Video Festival in Istanbul and Ankara , in Turkey between 29th of April 7 th of May 2006, during the May Day celebration.

This non-competitive festival is devoted to the screening of video and film on the lives and struggle of working class people all around the world, for the exchange and collectivizing of the experiences of the filmmakers, as documentary or fiction works of groups and individuals, committed to labor struggle; to spread the works that show the struggle of workers, unemployed, students, farmers and women as well as screening films that show the popular uprisings across the world. We believe this will help arouse interest in labor films and promote their production in Turkey and around the world.

Here is a first collection of links to migrant labor organizations in Israel compiled and annotated by Kirsten Huckebeck.

• The Workers Advice Centre (WAC; Arabic: ma'an) provides legal, organizational, cultural and educational support for the many unorganized workers in Israel. WAC tries to help building self-conciousness and organizational processes for unorganized workers, including for example campaigns like "a job to win". WAC is open to any worker, although Arabs in particular suffer from lack of union representation. WAC has an own website, where you can get an overview about activities and self-understanding of WAC.

 

• The Hotline for Migrant Workers is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), dedicated to promoting the basic civil and human rights of migrant workers and victims of human trafficking in Israel. The Hotline works using a four focus approach to advance its goals: direct intervention, legal action, policy making, and raising public awareness. Our work is based on the belief that Israel, as a democratic and Jewish country, should respect and protect the human rights of all those residing within it - citizens, residents and migrant workers alike. More about the Hotline!

Antonio Campenni, representative of the Italian Cobas (Comitati di base), accurately expressed the opinion of the delegates on one point, where there was no dissent: equal pay and equal rights would put an end to the competition among the wage earners. "Let the companies pay for their politics, rather than forcing the ‘migrants in their own country and from abroad’ into a competition of dumping." But how can an end to the competition be achieved under the conditions of high unemployment rates, a profoundly divided labor market and the politics of closure? To begin with, WAC’s answer to this question confronts on an obvious vacuum left by the Histadrut. The WAC started an organization offensive among Arab Israelis, accompanied by regular advisory meetings, shared cultural activities, education, and what belongs to the "core business" of unions: struggling for regular working conditions and wage agreements with the employers. In the course of the campaign "A Job to win", WAC’s organizers succeeded in concluding contracts with well-known Israeli construction companies. The latter committed themselves not only to employ more and more Arab Israelis, but also to apply the current wage agreements of the Histadrut on these contracts. About 500 workers, mainly Arab Israelis, could thus be placed, another 1,000 are registered at the WAC. A Sisyphean task, as Salah Athamneh commented on these efforts.

In principle, Arab Israelis (about 20 per cent of the population) have the same chances as other population and religious groups, because of the ""Equal Opportunities"" law. But they are facing both, direct and indirect forms of discrimination which evade this right. In certain sectors and companies they are not accepted with reference to security, Dr Noah Levine Epstein of Tel Aviv University explicated. While Arab Israelis without full citizenship – often the inhabitants of the refugee camps who merely have the status of residents – hardly have access to the public sector, the discrimination of Arab Israelis with citizenship was very easy to conceal. The legal comments on what counts as employment constraints in security relevant areas were so vague that the scope of interpretation was hardly limited. The economy of Arab Israelis is shaped by such restrictions imposed by the state and by informal constraints. In most cases they live in separate settlements or towns which due to the restrictive settlement and development policy have little or no possibilities to expand and develop. The few towns that have a mixed population and a corresponding economic basis have successively been "de-mixed" – in Nazareth this became very graphic since in the course of the Pope’s visit the entire development funds went into the construction of "Jewish" settlements, while the historical center of Nazareth where most of all Arab Israelis live was missed out. The townscape already shows who belongs to which population and where the wealth "lives". In the urban area of Jerusalem where the "security fence" is partly already in place it became clear what it will mean to the inhabitants of the Arab settlements and the refugee camps, once the fence will be completed: Shu’afat, a camp existing since 1967, where in the beginning 3,000 people lived, is to a large extent already fenced in. As soon as the fence will be erected on its third side adjacent to the urban area, there will be no exit for the meanwhile 23,000 inhabitants, except a small checkpoint. The chances to reach the urban infrastructure, hospitals, schools, nursery schools and jobs, that do not or not sufficiently exist within the camp, will drop rapidly.

But it was not the breaches of international and Israeli law that brought the Israeli government to diverge from its course of recruiting labor migrants. Only the economic crises in 2002, under the slogan "War on foreign Labor" led the government to the initiation of a migration police (Police Immigration Administration Department) and to begin the end of the "Open Sky" policy in reducing the quota for work permits. The guideline pursued by the Ministry of the Interior ""Israeli first"" therefore is a definitive reaction to this recession. Since then the migration police forces the deportation of labor migrants who came into conflict with their employers (or just had been fired for other reasons) and thereby into illegality – we are familiar with this procedure from other countries as well. Wagner reported that due to the poor working conditions and the bond on a particular employer, by now 50 per cent of the people who came legally with a work permit have been driven into illegality. The program of reducing foreign labor has been correspondingly successful: About 25,000 of the once legal migrants were deported, and some 60,000 other workers left without being deported during 2003, that is within a year since starting the end of "Open sky". For the year 2005 the commission on labor migration in the ministry under Yuval Rachlewski’s lead recommended the deportation of additional 100,000 workers.

As Hammer explicated, Israel, "as a formerly Socialist country and very anxious for international acknowledgment since its foundation", were signing a number of international agreements on fundamental human rights as well as the ILO convention. These offer a number of relevant connections to the legal claims of migrant workers – as, for example, the ban on discrimination of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which were also implying fair wages and working conditions – provided that they are put into codified national law. Furthermore there were progressive first signs on the level of the national labor legislation and administering of justice, like the ban on forced labor, the ""Equal Opportunity"" law (that actually affects only the equal opportunities of Arab Israelis), the freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, legal minimum wages and vacation entitlements, as well as the right to health care, which, "in principle", were granted to migrants as well. Most of this with the qualification that the workers were staying legally in the country and continue to do so.