Israel’s Economy Is Suffering As Arab Workers Stay Home

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

the Israeli labor force, they dominate certain fields, such as construction, agriculture and sanitation. In these areas, their absence has been palpable, as riots, curfews and threats from Palestinian militants have kept them away from work.

With 37 percent of the country’s construction workers coming from the occupied territories, the building business is the most vulnerable. And in this bustling city Arabs account for all of the street cleaners, many of the cooks and dishwashers and about one-third of the factory workers.

The unrest has also taken a heavy toll on food-processing plants and textile factories, particularly those in the south, where up to one-third of the workers in any plant may be from the Gaza Strip. The West Bank has been calmer, resulting in fewer absences from work.

Citrus Growers Are Concerned At the Polgat textile plant in the southern town of Qiryat Gat, for example, about 450 men of the total force of 1,400 have been attending work erratically for the last month because they live in the occupied territories, a personnel manager said.

Even the Jaffa orange is picked and packed by Palestinians, and citrus growers concerned about falling behind in their export schedules have been the first to demand that the Government let them bring in Portuguese and Turkish laborers. About 5,000 of the 15,000 citrus workers are Palestinians, according to Shalom Himlfarb, personnel manager at Tnuva Export.

“We’re not talking about building houses here,” Mr. Himlfarb said. “If it stays on the trees, it spoils. It’s not an emergency yet, but we want to prepare an alternative.”

Among the proposed contingency plans is the idea of recruiting students to work for either nominal wages or as volunteers, drafting soldiers to the job or offering temporary work and.wages to unemployed Lebanese who live in the Israeli-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

Ministry Won’t Change Policy So far, the Ministry of Labor has refused to change its policy, apparently for political considerations. “Our first and foremost obligation is to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, because they are under Israeli rule,” said a spokesman for the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Moshe Katzav.

“We must provide them with work. Those who have steady jobs are dedicated workers, and if they are out a day or two or there is a curfew in the camp, there is no intention of punishing them.” But he said that if the riots seriously disrupted Israeli industry, the policy could change. “In the meantime, the damage is peripheral only,” he said.

A survey conducted by the Israeli Army has estimated the economic damage from lost work at $40 million to $50 million, according to the newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth. In addition, sales of Israeli products have declined, since the occupied territories are a primary market.

But the employer-employee relationship is a symbiotic one, and Palestinians need the pay just as much as Israelis need the services. “I missed 10 days of work this month, but I got in on Tuesday and worked three days this week,” said Said, a 24-year-old from Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. who was unloading crates of avocados at a market in Tel Aviv.

“The soldiers let people out to work, and we live outside the city, near orchards, so no one of our own people stopped us. “I have two children,” he said, “and everybody has to eat.”

How this transcription was made

This scan is a complete newspaper page carrying TWO complete articles side by side, and the archive holds a record for each. This record transcribes the lower story, “Israel’s Economy Is Suffering As Arab Workers Stay Home”. The upper story on the same page, “Israelis Detain 10 Palestinians Termed Moderates” by John Kifner, is a separate record, o880115kifner. Both records show the whole page as it was printed rather than a crop of half of it, so the archive’s claim that every record is a photograph of the page its story ran on stays true; the cost is that the same photograph appears twice under two ids. The page also carries two shorter items not transcribed in either record: “4 Transferred to Guerrillas” from Beirut, and an Associated Press story from Seoul about the Korean Air bombing.

Cite this clipping

"Israel’s Economy Is Suffering As Arab Workers Stay Home," The New York Times, 15 January 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-106. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-106