Students, Workers Target Wage-Slave Traders

TEL AVIV, July 10 — Workers here are waging a fight against contract work and demanding direct employment, a boss-worker relationship without an intermediary agency that pay substandard wages. PLP’s involvement in this reform struggle can help win workers to communist politics.
A group of contract workers and fighters of the National Coalition for Direct Employment walked through downtown Tel Aviv, marking the pavement with chalk in front of businesses and government offices that employ contract workers. Several PL’ers, one of whom is active in the Coalition, took part in the activity.
On June 18, we also rode the train from Be’er Sheva to Haifa and back, talking with passengers and showing videos about the contract workers’ plight. The response was enthusiastic. Most passengers were strongly opposed to the capitalist practice of contract employment. Most fighters in the Coalition were social work students and their teachers. Instead of merely discussing the horrors of capitalism inside class, they came out to the streets to challenge this exploitation.
Contract labor is a relatively new form of super-exploitation of workers, first emerging in the late 1980’s after “structural adjustments”—that is, big cutbacks by the racist Israeli bosses. A contractor boss — a wage-slave trader — hires workers, typically for minimum wage or a little more, and rents them out to various businesses and government offices. This outsourcing is designed to cut costs at the workers’ expense. A contract worker rarely gets even those minimal rights prescribed by the bosses’ laws. In addition, contract labor enables bosses to deny responsibility for dangerous and miserable working conditions.
Capitalism Dehumanizes Workers
Contract work, like all wage labor under capitalism, is a way for bosses to dehumanize workers and treat them as commodities. But contract work also is a way to break organized labor and to give the lowest possible pay for the most work they can squeeze out of us. Both the actual employer and the contractor make big profits while we workers pay the contractors to exploit us. That is why the Coalition came to shame these exploiters and mark them in public as the wage-slave owners they are. Of course, the bosses’ state intervened. City Hall enforcement cops fined some of us, but we paid the fine and continued to mark the pavements in front of the businesses.
Fightback is important for building working-class consciousness in Israel-Palestine. The big strength of the Coalition is its inclusive nature. It treats all people as comrades and partners for change. But it does have weaknesses, mainly its reformist focus on changing contract employment to direct employment. It fails to recognize that all work under capitalism is exploitative.  
Inside the Coalition, we are building a base and putting forward revolutionary communist politics. Exploitation can be smashed only by a communist revolution. The bosses’ murderous profit system must be replaced by a workers’ state, where we the working class will run society. Friends in the Coalition want our class to work with dignity. For that, we need communism. Through this struggle, we are winning workers to join PLP.