Washington Report, November 2005, pages 38, 41

Islam and the Near East in the Far East

Chinese Workers in Israel Strike for Unpaid Wages

By John Gee

Around 200 Chinese workers sat down in protest outside the offices of Malibu-Israel, the construction company that had employed them, on July 5, reported Kav La’Oved’s August 2005 e-news. They insisted that they would not move until a company representative came to negotiate with them on their demand for payment of wages due for the month of May. They also called for the company to give them their pay slips for the entire time they had already worked.

Israel’s law on the employment of migrant workers such as these Chinese has changed recently. Instead of being hired directly by a construction company, they should now be employed by a manpower agency that will serve as a mediator. The company is meant to pay the workers’ wages to the agency, which then pays the workers.

Schemes such as this, when operated through reliable and well-run agencies, can give some protection to workers against unscrupulous employers who would deliberately try to cheat them of their wages. On the other hand, by placing greater distance between the workers and the companies that are directly using their labor, they make action to seek redress more complicated, as it is less obvious to whom workers should make representations. In this case, the Chinese workers saw Malibu-Israel as the right address for their protest.

When Kav La’Oved, an organization that seeks to defend the rights of the most disadvantaged workers in Israel—migrants, Palestinians and Israelis alike—heard about the strike, two of its staff went straight to the site to find out more about what was going on. Manager Hanna Zohar and former Chinese workers’ coordinator Reut Barak contacted a news team, and a television report containing interviews with workers, Kav La’Oved and Malibu-Israel was aired that evening.

The errant company promised to pay the manpower agency, and the Chinese workers returned to their jobs.

Also reported in the August edition of Kav La’Oved’s e-news were official statistics on migrant workers in Israel in 2004. A Central Bureau of Statistics press release put the total number of migrant workers at the end of the year at 188,000, of whom 91,500 held valid work permits. During 2004, 34,000 had entered Israel legally, with permits, and 41,000 had been deported or left voluntarily. The percentage breakdown for the workers’ countries of origin was: Thailand (31 percent), The Philippines (19 percent), Romania (14 percent), China (9 percent), former Soviet Union (9 percent), Turkey (4 percent), India (3 percent) and Bulgaria (3 percent). This suggests that the trend toward increasing employment of workers from East and Southeast Asia continues. Their proportion among the foreign workers in Israel in 2001 was around 10 percent.

There is little likelihood of Thais putting down roots in Israel.

The high figure for Thai workers is especially noteworthy. For most Thais, the Palestine conflict seems like something remote and complicated that does not concern them. (This is also true of most Filipinos and Chinese.)

The Thais are considered to be dependable and hardy workers. They usually know little or no English and stand out physically from the local communities, so there is little likelihood of their establishing relationships with Israeli women or putting down roots in Israel—two fears harbored by the host state. Employers frequently take advantage of their vulnerability, as a report produced by Kav La’Oved in May 2005 (‘Thai workers in Israel—The bonds of  silence’) relates. It concludes:

“Systematically widespread violations of basic rights, and the ease with which agencies and employers get away with such violations indicate the lax and insufficient enforcement of worker rights. Enforcement authorities are understaffed, lack translation, and have little effective means to deter and punish violators. This situation leads to the conclusion that bringing workers to Israel from Thailand and allowing their exploitation is the government’s way to subsidize farmers.”

Polygamy in Malaysia

Polygamy is one of those issues that almost invariably comes up in any discussion of the status of women in Muslim countries. Within those countries, areas of debate and social practice do not necessarily correspond to the perspectives of the non-Muslim West.

In Malaysia, a state with a 55 percent Muslim majority, polygamy is legal for Muslims—but with the qualification that a man needs the consent of his first wife to take a second. He may legally take up to four, but before each marriage, he must obtain the consent of his existing wives.

The issue is sometimes argued in terms of religion, women’s rights and human rights on lines that are similar across the world, but this can sometimes seem oddly out of tune with what’s happening on the ground.

Estimates of the number of men who have more than one wife vary considerably; some have claimed that up to 20 percent of Muslim men do, but a recent survey, published in the Aug. 7 New Sunday Times, and based on a sample of 7,589 married Muslim men, found that 5 percent have two wives, 4.3 percent have three, and less than 1 percent have four.

One of the difficulties in obtaining exact numbers is that the majority of Malay Muslim society frowns on polygamy, and so some men are secretive about how many wives they have. Many young educated men say they are happy with one woman. Some consider that the numbers of men and women in society are roughly equal and that, in any case, supporting a big family is expensive, so old social reasons for taking more than one wife no longer hold good. Among more conservative women who do not necessarily oppose polygamy in principle, there are views that inhibit its practice. Society at large tends to treat a first wife as the “real wife”: she is the one who goes to social events with her husband. Married women talk of younger potential second and third wives as “husband stealers” or “home wreckers.” Regardless of debates on the legal status of polygamy, it appears in practice to be an institution that is under pressure and in decline.

One intriguing aspect of the survey cited above is that it found that nearly 4 percent of Chinese men polled had two wives and 1.3 percent had three, while almost three percent of Indian men had two wives and two percent had three. Polygamy is illegal for non-Muslims, and nearly all Chinese are Christian or Buddhist and most Indians are Hindus.

The survey was carried out in 2004 by Universiti Putri Malaysia, a local university.

Fantasy Land

Some weird explanations have been advanced for the December 2004 tsunami. An Egyptian magazine, Al-Usbu’a, featured an article in January that said it was the result of an Indian nuclear test in which Israeli and U.S. experts participated. An Israeli Russian-language newspaper has come up with another whacky claim. According to Vesti, the tsunami was a punishment brought down by God on the Jews and the rest of the world for supporting the uprooting of Israeli settlements under Sharon’s disengagement plan.

Wrote Lily Galili in her article “Pullout as Pogrom” in the July 11 Haaretz, “The writer was also able to explain to his readers that the word ‘tsunami’ is indeed a transformation of the Hebrew words soneh ‘ami (hater of my people), a fact that leaves no doubt as to the validity of the thesis.”

Galili is being ironic, of course. Around the world, the tsunami brought out of the woodwork a strange assortment of believers in a brutal deity, all more concerned with rallying a following to their particular causes than with relieving human suffering.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.