TEL AVIV—Progressive Labor Party here is working within the Coalition for Direct Employment. This is a reformist mass organization that fights against the horrors of contract labor.
Contract bosses are essentially wage-slave traders. They hire workers, and then lend them to various businesses. Thus, a large business employs the worker in practice, but the legal employer, who pays the wage, is the contract boss hired by that business. This allows all sorts of abuse without holding the actual boss—the one hiring the contractor to provide workers—accountable. Contract bosses often pay very low wages and ignore benefit laws. The actual employer usually treats the contract workers, at best, as second-class workers, and at worst—as slave labor.
The Coalition, an open democratic organization, aims to get rid of contract work and get all workers direct employment. Everyone has a voice, leadership and membership. Even if this is your first day in the Coalition, you can speak up and be heard in it. The leadership team is mostly composed of women; most of the team members are working-class and only a few are “activists.”
The current coordinator (chair-person) is a working-class Black Ethiopian woman. The Coalition replaces its coordinator every five or so years; it has no “Leader for Life” as is common on the Revisionist Left. In short, it is a working-class organization open to everyone.
One coalition member, who is also a PLP communist, is a contract worker at a mall belonging to Azrieli Malls, Israel’s largest mall chain. The super-rich Azrieli family, one of Israel’s 19 richest families, owns this chain. They hire contract workers for housekeeping and security, pay minimum wage and sometimes do not pay for the lunch breaks. They even avoid paying legal benefits.
Sexism in the workplace
The Azrieli Malls employ women to clean toilets, including men’s bathrooms. They often do not allow the workers to lock the bathroom while cleaning. This means that men come and go, and sometimes go to the urinal right in front of them.
When asked to go to the stalls and close the door, some react to the women in a demeaning, sexist manner, sometimes to the level of sexual harassment. The bosses insist that women clean these bathrooms and continue to suffer constant harassment.
Last year, when the boss wanted to fire a worker who protested about this, the coalition bombarded the Azrieli Malls management with e-mails and text messages, and the worker was able to keep her job. The organization is now campaigning for direct employment at the Azrieli Malls.
We organized youth and workers from other work places to form a flash mob in front of the largest Azrieli mall in Tel-Aviv. We produced several videos and shared them on social media. We also leafleted in the malls. Progressive Labor Party will continue this fight with the coalition while exposing the exploitative nature of the capitalist system in the process. Wage labor, in its most basic essence, means being exploited economically and being robbed of our basic human dignity. The conditions are both racist and sexist.
The exploitative, sexist mall and contract bosses will not get away with their crimes!