Any day now, some 2,500 essential Thai agricultural employees may be deported from Israel.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFFruits224-88(photo credit: )
Any day now, some 2,500 essential Thai agricultural employees may be deported from Israel. They were hired and allowed entry by special permission last November, in order to meet an urgent demand for farm workers and give a vital boost to agricultural exports.
So what has changed since then? Have Israelis unexpectedly begun clamoring to do back-breaking seasonal work, at minimum wage? If anything, labor shortages have only been exacerbated and the difficulties for producers to meet export deadlines have grown more acute. So how is it that thousands of hitherto legal employees are about to be sent home?
The answer is that in an effort to increase the number of Israelis doing agricultural work, the system has tied itself up in bureaucratic knots. There's no denying the many adverse effects of inundating Israel's marketplace with cheap labor from less developed countries - much of it illegal. The first victims are Israeli job-seekers, who cannot compete with outsiders' readiness to take on unskilled and semi-skilled jobs for below minimum wage. Moreover, employers spare themselves a host of ancillary expenditures for social benefits, heath insurance and pensions.
Even earning the minimum wage, Israeli workers often become too expensive for employers, while the availability of low-priced substitutes is enticing to the greedy. When Israeli workers are priced out of the labor market, they rely on the country's social-welfare safety net, collecting unemployment benefits and income subsidies which often equal, and sometimes exceed, what can be earned from menial labor. Thus the inducement to work is gradually eroded.
The combination of cheap foreign labor and Israelis' disinclination to perform menial work at very low pay feeds into a social, economic and ethical phenomenon detrimental to the country. The need to break this cycle is indisputable.
This newspaper has strongly supported moves to limit the damage wrought by illegal labor and by the unwarranted and disproportionate granting of work permits to various employee categories. We recommended that fewer construction workers be imported. In return for fair compensation, this is a line of work which can and should attract more Israelis; it did in earlier decades.
We also opposed frivolous licenses that allow foreigners to work in our fast-food kitchens in the capacity of ethnic "chefs." We pointed out that many such "imports" had never handled a skillet. And we urged the authorities to crack down on the use of foreign workers brought in to work in the food sector, but who then wind up doing shifts in factories, painting houses and repairing roofs.
BUT excessive zeal in limiting foreign agricultural employees is exactly what we don't need. Here exceptions need to be made to the otherwise rational desire to cut back on the number of foreigners whose presence warps our labor market.
Exceptions should also be made in one other area: the often devoted care-givers who look after our aged and infirm.
The jobs of agricultural workers are frequently seasonal; their arrival cannot wait for the unsnarling of red-tape. Fruit not picked in time will rot, cause inestimable losses to local growers and cost them valuable market niches.
Some 25,000 foreigners are already employed in Israeli agriculture. An additional 2,500 were allowed in on condition that for each imported laborer, local farmers recruit an Israeli. That was mission impossible because there were no subsidies or other inducements to convince Israelis to sign on. The upshot is that critically needed foreign workers are being threatened with immediate deportation and their employers can't do much about it.
Thus, despite all the good policy intentions, Israeli agriculture is about to be dealt a blow, endangering markets and causing prices at local supermarkets to rise. The Arava region alone exports nearly NIS 1b. worth of produce annually. Now it is 400 workers short.
THE LOT of Israeli agriculture isn't an easy one at the best of times, its phenomenal successes notwithstanding. The climate is harsh, water is scarce, vandalism and terrorist predations are never far away. And the younger generation has been lured away from farming by more attractive options.
Having Israelis work in agriculture is a Zionist ideal. But the reality is that most Israelis don't want to do it. If we are to cut our dependency on foreign labor, let us do it elsewhere.
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