Check out Kav LaOved’s own Noa Shauer opinion piece.
“Let’s be honest, farmers in Israel will continue to demand more and more Thai migrant workers for the agricultural industry. They will also continue to employ, cheat and rob them. They will probably also continue to yell at the Knesset podiums that the employment costs are too high and will impoverish the agricultural sector. Hence, of course, they will continue to ask for permission to deduct more and more money from the employees’ salaries – so essentially the employees will subsidize their own employment.
All this will continue to happen because it’s profitable: it pays to employ a person who lives on your farm/field and is available to work at any time; it pays not to provide minimum wage without fear of consequences; not to pay social benefits (as illustrated the discussions of the Knesset two months ago, in which the farmers’ representatives shamelessly opposed the establishment of a governmental fund that would require them to pay pensions and severance-pay to employees as required by law); it pays to employ migrant workers from Thailand because the state encourages it and turns a blind eye to exploitation, while refusing to directly subsidize the local agriculture industry. It is profitable for farmers to continue exploiting tens of thousands of people.”
Read Noa Shauer’s full article in Hebrew in TheMarker, “The Farmer Double Standard”
