2007
Hotline for Migrant Workers
In May 2005, following many years in which migrant workers were employed based on the socalled
"binding arrangement" the State of Israel began implementing a new employment system in
the construction sector. Recently, it also began to formulate new arrangements for employing
migrant workers in the agricultural, care-giving and industrial sectors, which are supposed to
replace the current employment system in these sectors.
According to the former arrangement in the construction sector, any migrant worker working in
construction was directly employed by his contractor, and therefore, resigning or being fired meant
losing one's residence permit, and becoming an illegal alien liable to arrest and deportation.
According to the recently adopted employment arrangement, on the other hand, migrant workers
are employed by manpower companies (or "corporations" in official parlance), whereby they are
ostensibly allowed to change employers.
The present report seeks to examine the new employment system in the construction sector, after
having been in force for about two years. Our objective is to assess any changes since May 2005,
and in particular, to ascertain whether the move to employment by manpower corporations has
indeed improved the wages and working conditions of such employees, and whether it has
remedied the severe exploitation of workers employed under the previous arrangement. The report
also assesses whether, in enacting the new employment system, the State of Israel has broken the
"chains" binding migrant workers to their employers, or the new system remains just another form
of "binding".
Beyond examining the abstract principles of the new employment arrangement compared to the
old, the present report explores the actual implementation of the new arrangement. This is based on
the analysis of in-depth interviews with dozens of migrant construction workers conducted by the
Hotline for Migrant Workers and of hundreds of complaints filed against manpower corporations
by their employees through the Worker's Hotline organization.
The report also analyzes the new employment arrangement in the care giving sector. Since its
actual implementation has been repeatedly put off by authorities, and since it is not yet in force at
the time of this writing, the present project could not evaluate empirical findings related to care
giving employees. Therefore, we will only review them in general terms. Finally, in other sectors of the Israeli economy where migrant workers are employed, the new employment arrangements
have not yet even been determined, so that we will not be able to refer to them here.
The present document is the conclusive report of an annual project spanning the period July 2006
to July 2007. In March 2007, an interim report was published (in Hebrew only), outlining the
nature of the new system based on an analysis of data collected during the project's first six
months. The present report analyzes not only those preliminary data, but also new data collected
over the second half of its lifetime. The interim report referred exclusively to the construction
sector, assuming more data on the new employment arrangements in the other sectors could be
collected by the end of the project year. As already mentioned, however, the State of Israel has yet
to meet its obligations in terms of the deadlines for enacting those arrangements
Israel
