To prevent trafficking, allow migrants to leave abusive employers

Palestinian workers are tied to employers due to the government's concern that their unsupervised presence in Israel will threaten national security, and reform introduced in late 2020 to enable them to freely change employers was ineffective. Caregivers are restricted from moving between geographical areas, and if they have been in Israel for more than 51 months (about 40% of the migrant workers in the care sector) they cannot change employers at all. Thousands of migrant workers are tied to foreign construction companies, including workers building the light rail in the Tel-Aviv area (whose abuse was well-documented). And students in various ‘educational' agriculture programmes are tied to specific employers, often working in appalling conditions of little educational value.

These aspects of Israel's migration policy are not discussed in the government's anti-trafficking action plan. Specific groups or sectors, such as Palestinian workers and foreign construction companies, were mentioned as deserving further study. But there was no commitment to end binding once and for all.

In need of an alternative plan

In light of the government's omissions, the TraffLab project at Tel Aviv University (led by Professor Hila Shamir) began to formulate a catalogue of recommendations that offers Israel a completely different approach to dealing with labour trafficking. We have, aptly, called it the Alternative Anti-Trafficking Action Plan, and have made it available for download in both English and Hebrew.

The alternative plan takes a ‘labour approach' to human trafficking. This means that it seeks to address the economic, social and legal conditions that cause vulnerability and exposure to exploitation. It also tries to narrow power disparities by strengthening the bargaining position of workers vis-à-vis their employers, and by creating effective tools for workers and their representatives to transform and improve their working conditions.

This stands in marked contrast to most contemporary policies, which almost exclusively focus on criminal enforcement, restrictions on migration, and protection of human rights and assistance for identified trafficked persons. This approach addresses only the symptoms and does not alter the underlying causes of human trafficking. In some cases, it can even worsen those underlying causes.

The alternative plan targets several key policy areas. While the overarching themes of these areas (prevention, enforcement, and partnership) are similar to those of the dominant approach, the strategies proposed are markedly different. For example, it places binding arrangements front and centre. It insists on the complete and effective elimination of all absolute binding arrangements as one of its main policy recommendations. In doing so it distinguishes between large and small sectors. In large sectors, it suggests that individuals be allowed, at the very least, to move between employers within the sector. The state officially adopted this arrangement following the court decision in 2006, however, as the examples above show, many workers are excluded from the new arrangement.