The role of China's labor ministry officials in this story is especially noteworthy. Steve <http://www.kavlaoved.org.il/en_news110501.asp> [Translated from Ma'ariv, 11.5.01 by Moshe' Machover] The Great Wall of Cynicism by Sari Makover A group of 170 construction workers from China are being threatened with deportation from Israel and being put on trial for daring to strike and protest against their appalling conditions of employment. In his small carpentry workshop in the village of Nantu Tse near Shanghai, Lin Huaice first heard that in Israel there were more grains of gold than grains of rice. Although the Chinese carpenter was regarded as member of the lower class, he was not poor. But some people from Nantu Tse who had worked in Israel came back home richer than the Emperor. They built houses for themselves, bought cars and sent their children to university. The whole village envied them. So did Lin Huaice. In the offices of Nantong Er Jian-Ji Tuan, a construction company that serves as intermediary between Israeli building contractors and Chinese workers, Lin Huaice, 37, was received with open arms. His particulars were taken down, he was promised "comfortable conditions, excellent food, work that is not too hard, and at least $350 per month." He was asked for a deposit of $2,500 as surety. $2,500 is a fortune by the standards of a Chinese village; but this was the price of Lin Huaice's lucky ticket to Israel. He borrowed most of the money from a private moneylender in a nearby town and got the rest from his friends in the village. He took $30 from his aged parents, money that had been saved for a modest funeral and gravestone; but Lin Huaice, excited and happy, promised to erect a golden gravestone for his parents, when the time came. Cock-a-doodle-doo neck In January 2000, Lin Huaice arrived in Israel. Dressed in his only good suit, equipped with a passport, a long-term visa and $10, he was sent together with 169 other Chinese workers to the Toyota building site in the center of Tel Aviv, near the acoustic fence of the Ayalon Bridge. The A. Dori Ltd. Contractors were his employers in construction work and the go-between Chinese company was responsible for his living conditions. In a very short time he was turned from a foreign worker into an unskilled laborer. He says that he and his fellow workers were required to work for at least 11 hours a day, sometimes more. They were not allowed to take breaks at their discretion, not even toilet breaks. During the little free time they had, they slept or played cards. They were allowed out three times a week, for two hours only. They were lodged in small run-down quarters, something like caravans or containers, whose thin walls could not block out the incessant din coming from the Ayalon Highway. But this was only the beginning. According to Lin Huaice and his comrades, for a year and three months they worked for next to nothing.. Every month they received between 50 and 100 shekels [1 shekel = $0.24 = £0.17 approximately], which was barely enough for a phone-call to their families in China. It was certainly insufficient for supplementing the meager meals of cooked vegetables provided by the Chinese company. And since even workers of a particularly parsimonious Chinese company have to eat meat from time to time, the kitchen staff sent the foreign workers to the market to buy chicken feet and other leftovers. Sometimes the cooks asked the workers to gather leftover fruit and vegetables from the nearby market. Lin Huaice points his ten skinny fingers at his neck and says in a small voice, "cock-a-doodle-doo." This is how I understood, even before the interpreter arrived, that from time to time the workers' meal included chicken necks. By Wednesday, March 28 of this year, after 15 months in Israel, Lin Huaice no longer believed that he would ever see his wages. In consultation with his fellow workers, it was decided to down tools. Then 170 tired and indignant Chinese workers went to the office of the Workers' Hotline in Tel Aviv and asked for help in obtaining humanitarian and legal aid as well as payment of their wages in full. "Perhaps this is how Chinese workers are customarily treated in your country," he says angrily, "but this is certainly no way to treat human beings." For five days the Chinese government tried, through their embassy, to dissuade the workers from their decision to strike. The damage caused to the image of the Chinese government's construction company was enormous. The A. Dori contracting company also tried to put an end to the strike by threatening the workers with deportation. A copy of the letter was sent to the offices of the Workers' Hotline but Uri Dori, the Director General of the company, until recently president of the Association of Contractors and Builders in Israel, denies the existence of the letter and claims that forgery was involved. The Chinese workers' strike attracted public attention, and only then it occurred to the Ministry of Labor and Welfare, which is responsible for enforcing employment conditions and minimum wages, to dispatch a representative to the building site. As is usual in such cases, the inspectors were astonished that they had known nothing about the affair before it had blown up. Four in a container-like room The method of employing foreign workers in Israel provides many legal loopholes. In most cases the workers are employed indirectly, via foreign intermediaries, foremen and representatives of contracting companies, who pass the buck to one another, each disclaiming responsibility for the workers. This is also how things were done in the present affair. The A. Dori Co., which is a member of the Association of Contractors and Builders, received permission from the Ministry of the Interior to import workers from China. It contacted a Chinese construction company that employs cheap labor, and concluded a wage agreement with it. The Chinese company was to be responsible for [the workers'] living arrangements. The Chinese workers claim that the Chinese company did whatever it liked with their wages and living arrangements. The Israeli entrepreneur, A. Dori, did not wake up to the problem, at least not in time. The fact that foreign workers in Israel are employed in sub-standard conditions is well known, but the Chinese workers have posed a new challenge to the system: they decided to protest. They came to the offices of the Workers' Hotline dressed in jackets which covered their work shirts and tattered trousers. Only their torn shoes betrayed their miserable situation. "We realized at once that these were a better class of people than usual," says Hanna Zohar, the director of Workers' Hotline. "They were clean, gentle and very courteous. They drank only water, hardly smoked, waited patiently and spoke politely. They do not understand a word of Hebrew, but kept saying 'todah' and 'shalom' [Hebrew for 'thank you' and 'hello'/'good day']." Fu She, 35, married and father of a seven-year old son, collected from his fellow workers the modest fee that the Workers' Hotline takes for legal services -- a pile of one-dollar bills and 20-shekel bills. Together with the money he compiled a list of those taking part in the strike -- a page with symmetric Chinese letters, covered with delicate black ornaments, fragile as the workers' present situation. "When we arrived in Israel, the Chinese company took away our passports," Fu She relates. "We tried to complain but the company threatened us that we would be deported to China, and then we would lose not only our wages but the deposit as well. For us losing $2,500 is almost like a death sentence. Many people in China are waiting for this money." "They brought us to the building site. In each small room they housed four workers," Lin Huaice relates. "During most of the day we were working on site and it was very noisy and at night, when we finally wanted to rest, we couldn't fall asleep because of the din from the highway. Every passing bus woke us up. It took us nearly a month to learn to sleep with the noise." A soup of greens and green people Most of the Chinese workers arrived in Israel without a penny. Not so Ling Wa , 35, from south Shanghai, who arrived in Israel with a $50 bill in his pocket. He wanted to invest his money in an Israeli savings account. The company's representative in Shanghai had told him that two years in an Israeli bank would make that small bill swell up to the equivalent of one year's university fee for one's child. "By the time I had started to find out where and how to invest the money, there was nothing left in my purse," Ling Wa complains. "We were paid no wages whatsoever. We barely got pocket money. We used to get 50 shekels per month and recently, after we started complaining, they raised it to 100 shekels. For this money in China we could buy a lot of food as well as clothing and books. Here it was hardly enough for a few sweets. We are not spoilt; we only need food, an occasional evening at the cinema or in a pub and a few phone calls home to the wife. But the money we received was not even enough for food; and one also needs to change one's socks and underclothes." "If we had been getting enough to eat, we could have used the money for other needs and would not complain," says Ping, who is holding a tattered folder in which all the strikers' documents are carefully folded. "But the food we got was bad, really bad. We were given chicken feet and necks. In China we had never eaten such things, but here we were hungry, so we ate everything. "Once the Chinese company's cooks summoned two workers and sent them to the market to look for vegetables and fruit that no one else was ready to buy. They brought the vegetables and fruit to the kitchen and the cooks made a soup from them. We began to shout, but the Chinese company said that anyone who complained would lose three days' work, so we shut up. If at least we would have received money instead of food, we would have been able to return to China thin but wealthy. Now we are both thin and poor. We have been exploited all round." Fu She: "About once a month we would get stomach pains. Sometimes we all got them at the same time, and sometimes one at a time. Lin Huaice had it worst --he is very sensitive. We used to call him `Chinchai,' which is a Chinese bird that heralds the winter. Whenever Lin Huaice started vomiting we all knew that we would soon be down with a stomach ache." Ling Wa: "Once we asked the Chinese company to call a doctor. There were 20 sick workers on the site. At first only a few were sick but within a week it had spread. We had many green people. The doctor arrived only after a week, and he gave us some medicine. We kept what was left of it and used it whenever someone had a stomach ache. Sometimes it helped and sometimes it didn't." At a certain stage, says Ling Wa, some workers tried to incite the group to rebel. They said there was no point going on because no one would ever see any money. But there were always a few optimistic workers who believed that next month, always next month, they would finally get their wages as back-pay, so they were afraid to cause a stoppage. "I think that if we had stopped working, the company would have given us back our passports and deported us," Ling Wa explains, "but we would never have seen our money, neither the deposit nor the wages. I think the company would benefit a lot by having us deported to China. This way it would gain $350 [per worker] for each month we worked, as well as the $2,500 deposit. In China it is a fortune." Question: Why didn't you demand your wages from the [Israeli] contractor? "We did, but the representative of the Chinese company said we would get our money later. This way they strung us along for a whole year. At first they said they would pay us in Israel, but towards the end of the year they started telling us that we would only be handed the money in full in two years' time, after our return to China. We asked, what if we would not get the money? To whom could we complain when we were back in China? To the Israeli contractor? But the Chinese company said that they also had representatives in China, and if there were any problems they could be solved there; but if we were to make any problems here we would lose all of the money." Ping: "We worked hard and long. We started early in the morning and knocked off late in the evening. Each day we stopped work at a different time. One day we would work for 12 hours, another day 15. Sometimes we worked in the dark, sometimes in the light; and there were always representatives of the boss next to us. They kept telling us 'hurry, hurry,' because the contractor had been promised a bonus if the work was finished quickly. One of my mates asked the boss if we would also get part of the bonus for finishing the work ahead of time, but the boss got angry and told him he was cheeky. So we decided to go on strike. To both work hard and get no pay is too much." The director general of the A. Dori, Co. says in reaction to this: "We are an entrepreneurial firm. So there can be no truth whatsoever in the claim that we had to follow a timetable dictated by someone else, or that there was any wish to finish the construction job ahead of schedule in order to obtain bonuses." The embassy tries to hush it up On the morning of Wednesday, March 28, the workers left A. Dori's building site and went en masse to the offices of the Workers' Hotline. "I came to work in the morning and suddenly saw the whole street full of Chinese workers," recalls Hanna Zohar. "There were hundreds of workers there and I said to myself: so many workers, it is probably something serious. We asked all of them to come up to the office. They started talking about the hard work, about their living conditions and the non-payment of wages; and we were simply horrified. This was no better than slavery. In Tel Aviv, near us, with us, in our name. I felt ashamed. So what, if there is a bit of a recession in this country. Because of this one has to lose all semblance of humanity?" The workers spent the first day of the strike filling out forms. On the second day three more Chinese workers arrived from A. Dori's building site in Netanya. They told us they had been employed as steel fabricators [fixing armatures for reinforced concrete]. Exactly like their compatriots in Tel Aviv, they had not been paid. On the third day the workers stopped coming to the Workers' Hotline offices. "I was worried about the workers, so I decided to go to the site myself and meet them there," says Zohar. "As I came down [from the office] I saw [in the street] a well-dressed man talking with the workers, who surrounded him and were listening. An English-speaking worker told me that the man was an official from the Chinese Embassy who was trying to persuade them to go back to work. "I went up to him and signaled with my hands to the workers to go up to the office. The man from the embassy physically tried to block their way to the office, but later went away. On the following day he came to the office accompanied by another man from the embassy and officials of the intermediary Chinese company. He was very nice and told us that perhaps to us in Israel the conditions under which the workers were employed seem like slavery. But as far as the Chinese Embassy and government were concerned the workers were employed strictly according to Chinese laws, so that everything was right and proper. "Then, an official of the embassy began threatening the workers: if they did not get back to the building site and resume work, they would be deported to China and lose their deposit. I then stood up," Zohar blushes, "and perhaps I spoke a little rudely but I told the diplomat: 'Dear sir, perhaps in China it is allowed to employ people in this way, totally ignoring their needs for medicine and food and not paying them even a minimum wage. But here in Israel both Chinese and Israeli workers are employed according to different, more humane laws. In Israel it is not acceptable for workers to do backbreaking work until dark and then get food fit for dogs. In Israel third-world norms are not acceptable.'" Question: Why have the foreign workers waited until now? Why didn't they go on strike immediately when they found out about being exploited? "The Chinese workers are disciplined and adaptable, but also intelligent and quick-witted. They have amazing methods of communication. When something happens in a Chinese group in Yavniel [in the north of Israel], all those in Tel Aviv hear about it immediately. They were quick to discover they were being exploited, and even quicker to find out that they could get help from the law courts. This happened following the Solel-Boneh affair." (See below.) Implied threat against their families in China During the early days of the strike A. Dori, Co. claimed emphatically that it had transferred the wages of each worker in full to his bank account. Furthermore, when the strike went into its second day, the company officials quickly agreed with the workers that they should all go to the bank on the following day to withdraw their money. Ten workers who got to the bank on that day received balance sheets that showed that the accounts had indeed been opened in February 2000. But for technical reasons the items listed on the sheets begin only from December 31, 2000, that is, eight months after the start of employment. Zohar: "Someone had been playing around with the workers' accounts. In each item of deposit the name listed was that of a Chinese proxy, not known to the workers. It may be that of an official of the Chinese manpower company." Finally under the pressure of the strike the accounts of some of the workers were credited with the sum of $4,750, which they then withdrew. If they are right in claiming that they had not been paid for a year, then it follows that in fact they earned $400 per month. This is more than they had been promised in China, but less than the minimum wage in Israel. The 170 Chinese hurried back to the offices of Workers' Hotline, where they were provided with a lawyer who has since issued 30 claims on their behalf, and will soon issue claims on behalf of all the others. The claims are mainly against A. Dori, Co., which according to the workers is responsible, albeit indirectly, for delaying their wages; as well as against the Ministry of Labor and Welfare, which failed to supervise the contractor properly and did not enforce the labor laws. The revolt of the workers in Israel was not viewed favorably by the security authorities in China. On April 17 letters were sent by the authorities to the strikers and to members of their families in China, saying that upon their return to China the strikers are liable to be jailed for up to seven years. The letter, signed by the Chinese Public Security Bureau, the General Prosecutor and the Court in the town in which the Chinese construction company is located, goes on to say that if the strikers would denounce other strikers or "atone for their deeds," their punishment might be commuted. "Your conduct breaks not only the rules of the construction company to which you have subscribed, but also the criminal laws and contract laws of China," the letter says. "According to the labor laws of China, you are not subject to Israeli law but to Chinese law. Therefore those workers who disrupt orderly production will be sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and to loss of their political rights." In addition the workers were warned that upon their return to China the Chinese government would prosecute them and deduct from their wages the cost of the damage caused to the contracting company due to the strike. The matter of the letter was raised in a meeting held by a representative of the Chinese Economic Attach? with the workers. The representative claimed he knew nothing of the letter, but demanded from the workers on behalf of the Chinese government to obey Chinese laws. In general, the money earned abroad by Chinese workers is an important source of income for the Chinese economy. According to data collected by China's Ministry of Trade and Industry, remittances from Chinese workers abroad amounted last year to $840 million, which constituted 1.5 per cent of the country's foreign reserves. A coalition of human rights organizations in Israel appealed to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Minister of Labor and Welfare Shlomo Benizri and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, asking them urgently to obtain from the Chinese government an official promise not to penalize the Chinese workers who are striking in Israel. The group even suggested that Israel should provide political asylum to those who are afraid to return to China. Zohar: "This slavery is supported by the Chinese government. China sells manpower in exchange for arms and military equipment from Israel. Therefore the embassy has a stake in getting them to work nicely and quietly; or else, they will call the police, of which the Chinese workers are frightened to death. In 1996 there was a dramatic demonstration at Hayarkon Street [in Tel Aviv]. Dozens of workers from China, exploited by criminal Chinese manpower agencies, marched quietly in the direction of the Chinese Embassy. The demonstration was orderly and [well-] organized but suddenly the police arrived and subjected them to harsh violence. "At the time I did not understand who had called the police and why. Now I know it was the Chinese Embassy. They have a stake in having disciplined exploited workers who do not disrupt the economic traffic of goods from Israel in exchange for slaves from China. This week, too, officials of the embassy came to our office and threatened the workers that if they did not go back to work the embassy would call the police." The legal catch The catch for the Chinese workers consists not only in [bad] conditions of employment and wages. Before coming to Israel, the foreign worker is made by the intermediary company to sign an exclusivity agreement in favor of the contracting firm. If after arriving in Israel the worker wishes to leave the job and work for another contractor, who offers better conditions, he would immediately be regarded as illegal. "This is the great paradox," says Adi Lakser, a Workers' Hotline employee. "It pays the foreign workers to be illegal rather than work legally, because despite the drawbacks of the illegal status and the danger of deportation, an illegal worker can choose his own living conditions in Israel. A foreign worker who arrives legally is tied to the conditions and to the employer who brought him over." Perhaps for this reason the exclusivity arrangement is being re-examined. But Workers' Hotline is not waiting for the outcome of the re-examination. The association's lawyer has submitted to the law court a plea asking the court to compel the Ministry of the Interior to issue the Chinese workers with a permit to stay in the country even if they wish to defect from the contracting firm and go to work for another firm. At the same time the Ministry of Labor and Welfare has invited the director of A. Dori, Co. for an investigation regarding the delayed payment of the Chinese workers' wages. It should be noted that A. Dori, Co. denies any connection to the delay in payment of wages and insists that it has been depositing -- every month and in an orderly fashion -- about $800 in each worker's account. It may be that the Chinese intermediary company, or some agent on its behalf, has interfered with these accounts. At any rate, when the strike entered its fifth day the Chinese workers discovered their lost accounts. Thus, with their money, or at least part of it, in their pockets, they decided to go return to work. The last remaining obstacle is removing the threat against the members of their families in China. "We don't have much choice," says Ping. "If we leave A. Dori and go to work elsewhere, we would be deported. If we stop working altogether we would also be deported. If we continue the strike we will lose the money we have deposited, and all the wages we have received will have to be spent on air tickets." Meantime the workers fear that the Chinese company in Israel may attempt to cause them and their property physical damage. During last week the Chinese company, using physical force, threats and verbal abuse, took from the workers a considerable part of their wages, in some cases up to half. "Our only security these days," the striking workers told the Workers' Hotline, "is walking around in large groups, so as to make it difficult for the Chinese officials to harass us." Lin Huaice no longer trusts anyone. If he could get back the surety money he deposited in China, he would stop working at once as a hostage for the company and go back home to Nantu Tse. "Perhaps I will not be able to erect a golden gravestone for my parents," he says with a wry smile, "but at least I would be able to give them a decent funeral. After all we have been through, that's also something." The Solel Boneh affair Judging by its timing and similarity, it seems that the Solel Boneh affair served as a catalyst for the present strike of Chinese workers. The Solel-Boneh company has recently been convicted, according to its own admission, of failure to pay the minimum wage to foreign workers. This put an end to a long and complex legal saga that had lasted for over two years. At the beginning of 1999, the Worker's Hotline and the Israeli Association for Civil Rights complained to the Ministry of Labor and Welfare that 400 Chinese workers employed by Solel-Boneh were not being paid wages but had to subsist on pocket money to the tune of 60 shekel per month. The complaint went on to say that the workers' monthly wages were being withheld by the Chinese manpower company. The workers were supposed to receive their wages upon returning to China after two years' work in Israel. In March 1999, following the complaint, the Ministry of Labor and Welfare submitted to the Labor Tribunal in Tel Aviv a writ of indictment against Solel-Boneh, accusing it of delaying to pay wages as well as offering wages well below the legal minimum. On November 19, Judge Hanna Ben-Yosef of the Tel Aviv Labor Tribunal found Solel-Boneh and the Qingdao company -- a firm supplying Chinese construction workers to Israeli contractors -- guilty of paying the Chinese workers employed through them far less than the legal minimum. By an agreement between the Ministry of Labor and Solel-Boneh, which is enforceable as a judgment of the Tribunal, fines of 40,000 and 80,000 shekel were imposed on Solel-Boneh and Qingdao respectively. They also had to bind themselves not to commit similar offences in future. However, the Ministry of Labor and Welfare made a secret agreement with Solel-Boneh not to publish the latter's conviction regarding the minimum wage, although in such matters publication is the only way to enforce the law. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Labor and Welfare confirmed that indeed there was a gentlemen's agreement between the Ministry and Solel-Boneh, and explained that non-publication was part of a plea bargain. Reactions *Uri Dori, Director General of A. Dori Co., Ltd.: "A. Dori Co.totally fulfills its obligations to the workers. It pays their wages in full every month into their private bank accounts. The wages of the workers are customary and derived from the minimum wages in Israel. The workers have received special pay for overtime and working hours according to what is customary in the construction industry. The workers' claims regarding a bonus as a condition for finishing the job ahead of time are completely unfounded. "The living conditions and accommodation of the workers are the responsibility of the Chinese company; but in view of the facts disclosed in the news report, A. Dori, Co. is not ready to ignore the reality and hardship. We will not agree that workers of firms acting for us be subjected to humiliating treatment, although the legal responsibility is theirs. "We have appointed a team to examine the Chinese company's treatment of workers in all the projects it carries out for us. If the company fails to provide human conditions for the workers and refuses to improve them, A. Dori, Co. will put an end to the Chinese company's activity in this country." *Zhang Ping, director in the Chinese company Nantong Er Jian-Ji Tuan: "The workers are lying. The company has kept the money for them. The Chinese workers do not understand the laws in Israel, therefore the company keeps their money for them until their return to China. "Regarding the conditions of employment, the workers are lying. I cannot say that the food they were given was very good, but it was also not very bad. We are not talking about a hotel. The workers did not come for a holiday, they came to work. In any case, all the conditions, including accommodations, food and wages pass the test of Chinese law." * Lin Peng, official of the Chinese Embassy in Israel. "The Commercial and Economic Counselor and the Secretary in charge of labor relations have met the workers several times. Also, the embassy has urged the company several times to improve its conduct and take significant steps to improve the workers' welfare. "To the best of our knowledge the company has already taken several steps and obtained good results. The Workers' Hotline is also involved in this matter and we hope it will initiate actions that will help to resolve certain problems and contradictions that result from Israeli law. "Previous publications in the media have implied that an official of the embassy had threatened the workers that he would call the police if they do not go back to work. This is absolutely untrue. What we do is try to persuade the workers to go back to work and try to solve the problem by legal means that can be used for finding a reasonable solution." * Nahum Ido, spokesman for the Ministry of Labor and Welfare: "The Ministry is unable to defend every single worker. We have 80 inspectors who are doing a marvelous job, but as opposed to the people of the Workers' Hotline, who get around to people's houses and to the building sites, our inspectors cannot reach everyone. "On the day they went on strike, they were contacted by two [of our] teams. We took down their testimonies, examined documents and invited the director of the company to an investigation. Already on that occasion we detected that many things there were not in order. The Chinese company and the Israeli company have committed themselves to changing and correcting everything. "The Ministry of Labor and Welfare has invited an official of the Chinese embassy and informed him that in Israel this form of employment, of exploitation and fraud is unacceptable. If at the end of the investigation it will transpire that the law has been broken, we shall prosecute. We are also carrying out an extensive investigation regarding the conditions of employment and if it transpires that the [workers] have been kept in Israel in sub-standard conditions, the employers and those responsible will be prosecuted." * The Ministry of the Interior: "If a [foreign] worker wants to change employers, the [new] employer must apply for a permit. If the application is approved, the worker can change firms. The Chinese workers' lawyer has submitted such an application."
