Fw: Stop the China-Israel Migrant Worker Scam!

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

Date:         Thu, 20 Dec 2001 09:43:18 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Labor in the Global Economy <LABOR-L@YorkU.CA>
Sender: Forum on Labor in the Global Economy <LABOR-L@YorkU.CA>
From: DKProj Mgt <dkproj@YorkU.CA>
Subject:      Stop the China-Israel Migrant Worker Scam!
(To: LABOR-L@YORKU.CA



Stop the China-Israel migrant worker scam!

Kav LaOved wishes to point international attention to recent publications,
which expose a silent, legalised, and foul co-operation between the
Chinese and Israeli governments.

Tens of thousands of workers are brought from China to Israel. These
workers borrow thousands of dollars to pay for promised employment. As
they meet their prospective employers, however, over half of them find
that they have no real jobs. They remain penniless and without shelter.
They are not allowed to work for another employer and are destined to be
arrested for seeking alternative illegal employment. Eventually they will
be deported back to China, where they will face unpayable debts. The press
reports uncover the political and economic interests behind this legalised
scam. They outline the Chinese negligence as well as Israeli sinister
exploitation.

Kav LaOved is asking you to join the protest against both governments, and
against this systematic violation of human rights. We require
international exposure, protest letters, and other direct and indirect
means of pressure. We believe that a strong international appeal might
pressure decision-makers to end this scandal.

About Kav LaOved

Kav LaOved is an Israeli NGO, which defends the rights of disadvantaged
workers. We help migrant workers, Palestinians, and other low earners, to
face their daily rations of abuse, exploitation, and distress.

Kav LaOved, founded 1990, is active both on the individual and public
levels. On the individual level, we helped over 2000 workers win over
$3,000,000 during the year 2001 alone. On the public level we are involved
in legal activism against employers and state agencies, as well as in
lobbying and advocacy campaigns. We have had important achievements in the
areas of regulation and legislation, media coverage, and the raising of
public awareness.

In the last decade, due to frequent closures and lack of access to
Palestinian workers, Israel has opened its gates to a migrant workers
community, which now stands at 250,000 people ­ some 10% of local
workforce. The rights of these workers are obtusely and cruelly violated
by the very employers and authorities, which work so hard to import them.
While migrant work is a common phenomenon, the deliberate and
institutionalised import of unemployment is probably an Israeli first.

------------ Article PART I ---------

Yedioth Acharonot, Weekend Supplement December 7, 2001

You Have So Many Unemployed, What Do You Need Us For?

   Oron Meiri, Meron Rappaport, and Ofer Petersburg

There are in Israel today 23,000 legal Chinese migrant workers.  Only
10,000 of them have steady work. So who profits from bringing 13,000
unemployed Chinese to Israel?  First of all, the so-called handlers, who
receive thousands of dollars from each Chinese worker, even if he doesn't
put in a single day's work.  Secondly, the contractors, who conceal
hundreds of millions of dollars in income at the expense of the Chinese
workers fictitiously registered with them.  Thirdly, the "grabbers," who
pick them up every morning at the intersections because they are ready to
do any work for next to nothing.  Every Chinese worker here has mortgaged
his life in China in order to reach Israel and he has no way of getting
back.  Still they are thrown out of cars on the way from the airport.
This is the way the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Shlomo Benizri,
fights unemployment.
                             (This is the first article in series on the
subject.)

"I see the figures on unemploymentwe examined the subject and learned that
a large number of illegal migrant workers don't work in construction or
agriculture but in hotels and restaurants and cleaning private houses,
thus taking the place of Israeli workers.  Today, when we are at such a
low point and so many workers have been fired from the hotels, why do I
have to bring migrant workers to take their place?  I don't understand why
in some restaurant a slant-eyed person has to bring me my food.  An
Israeli wouldn't agree to do that?" (Shlomo Benizri, Minister of Labor and
Social Welfare, in Yedioth Acharonot, May 2001)

He is right, Benizri, so right.  He doesn't have to say so in such a
racist manner.  After all, people with slanted eyes have not yet done
anyone here any harm, but it is true that the last thing that Israel needs
nowadays is migrant workers to compete with 250,000 unemployed Israelis.
It is surprising, therefore, that the Ministry of Labor and Social
Welfare, of which he is the head, allows the superfluous import of
thousands of migrant workers or, if we can be more precise, thousands of
unemployable migrants.

The new about-to-be-unemployed Chinese workers arrive here every week on
Wednesday night on Flight 095 of El Al from Beijing.  In the contracts
they have been asked to sign in China, they are promised work in
construction that "will contribute to the development of the country."
Some of them actually are integrated into construction work but thousands
of them discover during the first few months of their employment on the
building sites that nobody intends to pay them the wages promised them in
China and they are soon out in the streets.  Sometimes the rude awakening
is even sooner. "A friend of mine arrived from China a month ago," reports
Neeu, one of the unemployed Chinese who lives right now in Pardess Katz [a
poor suburb near Tel Aviv].  "He arrived at the airport, his passport was
taken away from him, he was taken in a car and after two kilometers
everyone who arrived with him was told to get out of the car because there
was no work and everyone had to look for work for himself."

At this point it should be emphasized that we are speaking about legal
migrant workers, people who arrive with permits to work in the building
industry.  They are people who have personally been signed on in the
presence of Israeli contractors and representative of Chinese and Israel
manpower agencies after they received all the necessary permits from the
Labor and Social Welfare and Interior ministries.  It is only after
arriving in this country that they discover that there is no work for
them. At 6:30 in the morning one can see them in Bnei Barak (a town not
far from Tel Aviv).  They stand at the intersection of Jabontinsky and
Aaronowitz streets (locally known as the "slave market"), trying to obtain
work for the day (The "slave market" is a term that was carried over from
the days before the first Intifada, when Arab workers from the occupied
territories stood there for the same purpose.)  Similar "markets" exist in
Haifa, in Modi'in and in the south.

According to a rather cautious estimate, there are 13,000 unemployed
Chinese workers stuck in Israel, from the total of 23,000, here legally.
In other words, 60 percent of them were brought here needlessly.

For the Israelis, it's a nuisance, for the Chinese themselves a
catastrophe.  In order to get here in the first place they had to pay the
Chinese and Israel manpower agencies between $2800 to $10,000, a fortune
in Chinese terms. No Chinese building worker has that kind of money.
They are forced to go into debt, to take loans from all their friends and
acquaintances, or to mortgage everything they own.  In China they were
told that they would be able to repay the loan within a year.  In Israel
the bubble blew up in their faces.

Now they are here. They have no money to buy a ticket home, their
passports have been taken from them by the manpower agencies -- the ones
who threw them into the street in the first place and are now demanding
further payment if they want their passports back.  At home, their
creditors are waiting with bared teeth.  "The thing I want most right now
is to get my things together, get back my money from the Chinese manpower
agency and get the hell out of here," says Yun, a worker who has been
stuck in Pardess Katz for a year.  "But I know that if I don't get the
money, I will be stoned when I return to the village."

So, why in hell are they here, these people who get on Benizri's nerves?
Who brought them here?  Why were they given empty promises?  In whose
interest is it to flood the labor market with thousands more unemployed?
How is it that people like that continue to arrive every week, even today?
How is it that the Contractors' Association and the Ministry of Housing
are continually carping about the lack of construction workers when all
the intersections in Pardess Katz are flooded with Chinese workers dying
for a day's work?  Every single one of the more than 10,000 Chinese
workers is registered with a contractor.  How is it that the contractors
complained that only 4000 Chinese workers ran away from their lawful
employers?  Why doesn't the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare put an
end to this Pandemonium?  Can it be that one of the greatest tax scams in
the history of the state of Israel is going on right under our noses?

The importing of Chinese workers to Israel began about five years ago,
when the real estate market was flourishing and it was hard to find enough
workers.  The Chinese construction workers, who earn between $100 to $200
a month in China, constituted a large reservoir of working hands. Since
they specialized in "the finishing touches" -- putting in tile floors and
painting -- they were brought here in addition to the other building
workers from Turkey and Rumania.

The whole business gradually became established.  Like mushrooms after the
rain, manpower agencies sprang up in Israel and China whose sole purpose
was in finding the suitable workers and bringing them to Israel.  The
applicants were promised $4-5 an hour and Israel was marketed to them as
the gateway to a quick fortune.  At the beginning, the Chinese agencies
asked only $2500 for bringing them to Israel and arranging a visa. In time
the price went up to $5000.  Some of the money remained in the hands of
the Chinese agents but most of it flowed into the hands of the Israeli
manpower agencies, which made at least $3000 on every Chinese worker
brought into the country.

As long as there was work the whole business was tough but on the up and
up.  Here and there, it is true, there were complaints about the Israeli
employers who didn't pay what they had promised, or about impossible
working conditions or about the degrading attitude of the employers to
their workers.  But as long as these were localized complaints, nobody was
ruffled.  The workers continued to arrive and Israeli public opinion grew
apathetic.  This was due in no small part to the Benizris and their ilk
who never stopped denouncing the illegal migrant workers in the country.
The migrant workers are suffering?  Too bad, let them suffer.  They've
come here to work not to have a good time.


Yedioth Acharonot, Weekend Supplement
December 7, 2001

You Have So Many Unemployed, What Do You Need Us For?

   Oron Meiri, Meron Rappaport, and Ofer Petersburg

There are in Israel today 23,000 legal Chinese migrant workers.  Only
10,000 of them have steady work. So who profits from bringing 13,000
unemployed Chinese to Israel?  First of all, the so-called handlers, who
receive thousands of dollars from each Chinese worker, even if he doesn't
put in a single day's work.   Secondly, the contractors, who conceal
hundreds of millions of dollars in income at the expense of the Chinese
workers fictitiously registered with them.  Thirdly, the "grabbers," who
pick them up every morning at the intersections because they are ready to
do any work for next to nothing.  Every Chinese worker here has mortgaged
his life in China in order to reach Israel and he has no way of getting
back.  Still they are thrown out of cars on the way from the airport.
This is the way the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Shlomo Benizri,
fights unemployment.


But in time it became clear that they were not even coming here to work.
The real estate market fell into a deep slumber, and building starts
dropped from 60,000 to 30,000 in the last year because of the Intifada.
The number of migrant workers, however, did not drop.  It even grew.  It
was simple: the manpower agencies realized that it was more profitable to
bring Chinese workers here -- after being paid thousands of dollars to do
so -- than to employ them once they were here.  Thus, at a time when
construction in Israel has hit its lowest point, these traffickers in
human beings run around to building contractors, urging them to request
more and more working hands from the Labor Exchange .  In return, these
handlers promise the contractor thousands of dollars for every worker that
reaches Israel without his having to employ him for even a single day.
Is it any wonder, then, that the contractors go along with the ploy?

"Chinese workers -- that's where the money is," says Batya Carmon, head of
the visa section in the Ministry of Interior. "They pay more for them than
for any other worker.  It's a business in the billions.  It pays to bring
them here even if they're not given jobs.  They bring people who are not
even skilled workers. Nobody needs them.  The handlers come to contractors
or farmers, asking them to sign a form for the Labor Exchange and pay them
for doing that."

"What makes it worthwhile to bring the Chinese workers here is the sum
each one of them has to pay to for the right to work -- $5-8000," says
David Mena, the former director general of the Labor Exchange.  After a
month or two the worker finds himself in the streets, either because he is
not skilled or because the contractors have nothing for him to do -- after
they receive their share of the fee from the handler. The guy has
mortgaged his house in China and is now completely bankrupt. They're
letting him go to the dogs. They tell the contractor: 'We'll get you
workers as long as you put in a request for more than you need.' That's
great for the contractor who is under pressure to find more working hands.
Their condition is that the workers be Chinese.  That's where the big
money is.  A week ago I got a call like that. One of the handlers offered
me $1200 for every worker I import through him.  If the contractor is
desperate he'll be overjoyed at the offer.  That way the handler brings in
another fifty workers at his expense.  Either they'll have work when they
arrive or they won't.  Sometimes it is worth to the contractor that they
don't work at all. It's all a loop that begins from above, with the Labor
Exchange, through the manpower companies and, sometimes, through the
contractor. And the guy paying for it all is the Chinese worker. And we're
talking about an awful lot of money."

"We also have a responsibility for the Israelis living in places where
there are migrant workersthe crime rate is soaring, violence, drugs,
prostitution.  Those people behave differently, disgustingly, improperly.
One of the stories going around is that they sit in the stairway shooting
dope into each other.  People are scared to death because of them.  They
don't leave their homes after four in the afternoon."  (Shlomo Benizri,
Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, in Yedioth Acharonot, May 2001)

In the case of Pardess Katz, it wasn't the Chinese who brought crime into
the neighborhood.  The old-time residents find the Chinese good neighbors,
pleasant, clean, quiet.  They leave on rice and cabbage, pay the rent on
time ($100 per capita with sometimes as many as 20 in one apartment --
think of how that affects the rents in the neighborhood). And they're
always, but always, smiling. Even when they're really being put through
the hoops.  But behind the smiles, they are very angry. "I want my
passport back," says one of the men forthrightly, when he understands that
we are preparing an article on the harrowing conditions of their lives.
"Without my passport I am not a free person.  It's giving Israel a very
bad name, when you act like that towards the Chinese. If we don't get our
passports back we are going to make a revolution, like the cultural
revolution."

At the Workers' Hotline [an Israeli NGO that defends workers' rights] they
know these stories by heart.  Once a week, on Monday afternoons, Chinese
workers gather here.  They practically all have the same complaint: there
is no work, and if there is, they don't always get paid.  Chana Zohar, the
head of the organization, tells us that in the last few month they
received no less than one thousand similar complaints.  It's a pretty
large figure, by any calculation, and has been growing by leaps and bounds
ever since Benizri took office.

Dozens of Chinese have gathered around us. All of them paid thousands of
dollars to come here, they all worked a month or two in construction --
sometimes three months.  None of them received real wages, nothing more
than starvation wages.  "I worked on a building near the sea in Haifa,
near the main road," one of them tells me.  He is wearing a yellow shirt
and has the beginnings of a moustache.  "I was given NIS 100 [$24] a month
for food.  I was really starving.  We would go to the market and collect
things from the ground, paying a shekel for them.  In the end I left."
Here too, in Pardess Katz, it's not exactly a gold mine. "There is no
work.  We're taken to work only from time to time and then we're not
always paid," he says. But it's better than starving to death on a
building site in Haifa.

Yun is ready to identify himself only by his family name.  He has received
us in his crowded apartment in Pardess Katz. Like most of the Chinese
workers who stand at the intersection, he comes from a small village,
Pujean, in a poor area in the south of China.  "A couple of months ago I
saw an ad in one of the papers promising work in Israel at $4 an hour.  I
thought that that was a wonderful offer.  The Chinese company that
published the ad, 'Po Tung,' asked us for $5000.  That's a lot of money in
China but I appealed to my neighbors, to my family and friends and was
finally able to get the money together."

The minute he reached Israel, his passport was taken from him and he was
sent to a building site in Jerusalem.  There have already been Chinese
workers there and they told him that the bosses didn't pay.  In Jerusalem,
in the final analysis, he didn't work at all because there was no work.
 From there he was sent to Rishon LeZion and then to Beersheba.  It was the
same story all over again: no work, no money.  He finally ended up in
Pardess Katz.  A friend of his told him of the Chinese colony in the town.
"My friend arranged for me to stay at an apartment with another twenty
workers. WE don't have anything to eat. We manage to get a little rice and
cabbage and that's what we eat.  We can't afford any more."

Phon walks around with a worker's permit from a manpower company.  He also
worked two months on a construction site, but he doesn't even know where
it was.  He was, naturally, never paid.  He asked the company to at least
return his passport to him but he was told that he would have to pay for
the privilege.  He didn't dare appeal to the Chinese Embassy.  But even if
he had, it wouldn't have helped very much. One of the more veteran workers
explains that he tried to go to the Chinese Embassy in Tel Aviv but he
wasn't allowed in. Another worker says that he, in fact, did get inside
but the clerks there told him that if he wasn't getting paid it was his
problem. If they succeed in getting the Company that hired them on the
phone, they get the same answer. "If they owe you money, that's your
problem."

"They're all Ali Baba.  They all lie and tell you fairy tales," says the
worker who refuses to identify himself. "The Chinese and the Israelis are
in this together."

"I haven't told my family anything.  I prefer that they not know what it's
like for us here," says Yun.  "I have warned all my friends not to even
think of coming here.  But the company goes from town to town organizing
workers and there are enough of them who never heard how they treat
workers in Israel." Some of the stories appeared in a local paper in
Pujean, but it apparently had little influence.

Forwarded by:
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