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The Occupation of Labor - Employment of Palestinian Workers in Israel
... Understanding why smuggling flourished in the Palestinian economy, and increasingly gave rise to additional number of involved actors can unveil more hidden aspects of economic integration. In another example, Palestinian labor and Israeli employers are being mediated by different modes of brokerage relations (Niezna 2018). Opening the "black box" of brokerage can reveal extremely different levels of labor exploitation, and explain how exactly Palestinian-Israeli economic integration is operating under colonial domination. ...
... Therefore, not only the access of each Palestinian wage-labor to the Israeli market is conditioned by the acquisition of a "working" permit, but also the system of recruiting Palestinian labor for specific working place is considered complicated due to the segregation conditions. Hence, the permit brokers in the West Bank became a central figure in the political economy of labor migration (Niezna 2018). ...
... For instance, in the pre-Oslo period, West Bank construction labor migration was mainly recruited through Labor Offices managed by the Israeli civil administration (Israeli brokers) in consultation with the Israeli Ministry of Labor (Farsakh 2005b, 103). By contrast, in the post-Oslo period new types of recruitment systems appeared, notably the growing reliance on Palestinian brokers and manpower suppliers (Niezna 2018). 2 More than a simple alteration in the modes of recruitment (from Israeli broker to Palestinian broker), it is a structural mutation with far-reaching implications on the political economy of the West Bank labor migration that have not yet been fully explored. ...
This contribution engages critically with the literature on the economic relations between the West Bank and Israel. It attempts at both highlight various relationships neglected in previous research and drawing on new analytical foundations. Sweeping characterizations of the Palestinian economy as de-developed and dependent obscure the complexity of economic relations at a disaggregated level. Israel’s colonial domination of the West Bank has indeed resulted in a deprived, exploited and pauperized economy, but it has also given rise to profit-seekers and cross-border networks. Therefore, the chapter focuses on smugglers and permit brokers as two examples of the under-researched interaction between Palestinian economic actors and the Israeli occupation. For this purpose, two analytical tools are employed to shed light on the variety of positions that Palestinian actors actually occupy in the context of economic integration with Israel. First, the idea of borders as selective “corridors,” and not only rigid barriers, enables us to identify a wide range of border-crossing activities that entail different types of encounters with Israel’s border regime. Second, precisely because of the rigidity of Israel’s segregating measures, brokerage plays a pivotal role in inventing and enabling new economic relations.
... There are many sociological and political-economic studies of Palestinian workers in Israel, going back to the early days of the occupation post-1967. A key characteristic of these studies is the relationship between the changing political context and the regulation of employment for Palestinians, most notably the possibility of entering the Green Line at all (Farsakh, 2005;Niezna, 2018;Rosenhek, 2003). 2 Groundbreaking studies of Israeli industrial relations (e.g. Shalev, 1992) implicitly accept the framing of noncitizen Palestinian labour as migrants entering 'Israel proper', as do studies of Palestinians in the Israeli labour market (Portugali, 1993;Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein, 1987). ...
... Some have discussed this in terms of colonialism versus capitalism (Mundlak, 1999) or studied the impact of globalised capitalism or neoliberalism on regulation more broadly, including Palestinian labour regulation, and the dynamic between these liberalising forces These studies reveal decreasing focus on the Green Line in sociological scholarship and increasing focus on 'barriers' between different population groups, regardless of geography. Some kind of border between 'Israel proper' and the Palestinian territories still exists both in various political and scholarly discourses and 'on the ground', manifested in barbed wire, concrete and military control, and in the bureaucracies that control population movement (Adnan and Etkes, 2019;Berda, 2017;Niezna, 2018). However, there is growing recognition in scholarship and among social actors that Palestinians are not 'standard' migrant labourers: many speak Hebrew reasonably or even very well, they are familiar with the region including its sometimes-challenging climate, and they go back to their families at the end of the day or week. ...
This article explores the role of internal borders in shaping conditions for noncitizen workers in the context of ethnonational and territorial conflict. Based on research in Israel/Palestine and drawing on recent scholarship that problematises essentialist understandings of borders, the article asserts that working conditions are shaped by bordering practices which constrain the activities of social actors and determine the legitimacy of organisations in various enclaves within contested territory. Moreover, borders facilitate the creation of individualised workers separated from other ‘indigenous’ identities and collectives, dividing the ‘legitimate’ worker from the threatening or valueless. The article thus contributes to recent work on the nexus between employment conditions for migrant workers and immigration regimes, arguing that within contested territory, internal borders do not merely facilitate the exploitation of noncitizen workers, but assist the state in managing conflicting logics: inclusion for exploitation and exclusion of unwanted ‘others’ from the ethnonationalist political community.
... As noted by Shalev (2017), the Division's staff may have also lacked the desire to pursue its formal goals (see also State Comptroller 2014: 525). These deficiencies reduced workers' access to many social rights, such as vacation and sick pay (State Comptroller 2014;Shalev 2017;Niezna 2018). For example, to be eligible for sick pay, the Division required workers to obtain a medical certificate from an Israeli physician; but lacking Israeli medical insurance, Palestinian workers struggled to obtain this certificate. ...
... These challenges to the combined neoliberal-ethnonational regulation of the labor market came at the peak of a previous process of liberalization that began in the 1980s (e.g., Kristal and Cohen 2007;Bondy 2020). While the IR institutions in the construction sector remained relatively intact, the emerging reworking strategies posed increasing threats to their maintenance: Civil society criticism of the Histadrut increased, noting its lack of action regarding Palestinians despite receiving agency fees from them (Niezna 2018); and employers, faced with increasing legal claims, began demanding that the Histadrut act to reduce Palestinians' access to the labor courts. ...
Based on a case study of non-citizen Palestinian workers in the Israeli construction sector, this article explores the dynamic relationship between the exclusionary imperative of ethnonationalism and the inclusionary imperative of neoliberalism. The authors argue that these imperatives together constitute a heuristically useful framework that can help to explain the choices of social actors and the constraints on these choices, as well as the apparently contradictory developments that affect industrial relations institutions and the employment relationship more broadly. While neoliberalism generally weakens organized labor, the study shows how the dynamic between these two imperatives can open space for the inclusion of disenfranchised ethnonational groups within collective labor relations—a first step to political empowerment. The study thus re-asserts the importance of organized labor as a powerful actor able to engender progressive change, even for the “ethnonational other” under rigidly ethnonationalistic regimes.
... Despite its ostensible commitment to long-lasting collective agreements in the sector, the Histadrut, committed to an Israeli nationalist ideology, refrained from organizing the noncitizen workforce (Farsakh, 2005), thus promoting the precarity of the Palestinian workforce, most of them being formally unskilled workers (Preminger, 2017), and leading to a rapid decline of sectoral union density. 1 Even though Palestinian workers were allowed to work (almost) without restrictions in Israel, they were subject to separate employment relations (Niezna 2018). Their wages were transferred through a governmental "Payment Division"-intended to enforce lawful employment while synergistically complementing the partial representation of the corporatist, exclusive union strategy (Shalev, 2017). ...
Labor scholars identify increased roles of “new labor actors,” such as civil society organizations, in workers’ representation. Previous work found their increasing tendency to cooperate with unions, opening these up to inclusion of precarious workers. Praising these cooperative relations, research has understated other interactions that might develop between labor actors and their contributions to workers. Focusing on the relations among new labor actors and unions in the context of Israeli corporatism, this article analyzes conflictual interactions among labor actors and their implications of these for union legitimacy as well as for workers’ representation. Comparing two cases—of noncitizen Palestinian construction workers, and of subcontracted cleaning and security workers—the article argues that “conflictual complementarity” persists in the relations between labor actors in corporatist contexts. Conflictual complementarity is identified as based on sectoral traditions, contributing to transformations in union representation of precarious workers.
Contributing to debates over relations between the collective and juridified regulation of labor, this article analyzes a rich case study in the Israeli construction sector to claim that juridification can spur unions and employers’ associations to initiate strategic and inclusive change. By subsuming processes of juridification into traditional IR frameworks and embracing its logic and practices, the corporatist social partners broaden the relevance of collective labor relations to workers otherwise excluded from direct union representation. In this way, while not increasing union density or improving wages, these ‘traditional’ IR actors reassert their monopolistic control over worker and employer representation, as well as over the sectoral labor market.
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