Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare

General Budget: 3.5 billion NIS

Development Budget: 35 million NIS

Development Budget Designated for Arab Citizens: 12 million NIS (3.4%)

Number of Employees: 3,525

Number of Arab Employees: 170 → 4.8%

Projects:

The Ministry participates in a special projet for enhancing quality municipal government initiated and administrated by SIKKUY in conjunction with the Ministry of the Interior, the Society of Culture, Youth and Sports and JDC-Israel.

Issues:

1. Allocation of social workers to communities in distress:

· In the three clusters at the bottom of the socio-economic scale there are thirteen Jewish communities and forty-eight Arab communities.

· The ten communities at the bottom of the employment scale are Arab.

Average Number of Social Workers per 1000 Residents

Countrywide 0.45

Jewish Development Towns 0.7

Arab Communities 0.42

Arab citizens have many pressing problems, among them: lack of convenient access roads; the policy of land allocation for building, industry and public buildings; unemployment; low personal and group self-image as a result of neglect, long-standing discrimination and inappropriate education.

Nowhere are the negative results of neglect and discrimination reflected as strongly as in the matter of social well-being.

Welfare authorities may try to contend that the overall responsibility is out of their hands, and that the assistance they are able to provide is at best a band-aid solution for serious ills, curable only through comprehensive treatment by the various infrastructure ministries.

Nonetheless, it does have the power to take action, and with an appropriate investment of funds and professional resources, the welfare authorities can bring about change and improvement in the condition of the communities. Arab communities and citizens, by any standard, require assistance of experienced welfare and community workers.

Community workers are agents of change who have the power to bring about organizational change and relief for both the community and the individual. By the very presence of community workers on site, the establishment sends a message to its citizens that the State is concerned about and paying attention to their well-being.

Here again, State resources are not distributed equally. A comparison of the State’s investment in Jewish development towns as opposed to Arab communities indicates that there is no direct coordinate between need for assistance and its delivery by the State. The State shows a blatant preference for helping citizens who are residents of Jewish development towns over citizens in the Arab communities, as far as the distribution of welfare services is concerned, as reflected in the following tables:

Average Employment Income Per Person in NIS

Jewish Development Towns

Ofakim 546 Shderot 742 Or Akiva 778

Arab Communities

Kafar Manda 280 Kabul 379 Boeyna Nagidat 452

Number of Social Workers per 1000 residents

Jewish Development Towns

Ofakim 0.73 Shderot 0.77 Or Akiva 1.09

Arab Communities

Kafar Manda 0.34 Kabul 0.27 Boeyna Nagidat 0.33

2. Discrimination at Work on the Basis of Nationality:

· Research conducted in the 1990s shows that that the average hourly wage for Jewish women is 28% higher than for Arab women, and the average hourly wage for Jewish men is 33% higher than for Arab men.

· As a rule, Arabs are highly represented in “declining industries” such as textiles, metal, rubber, and food; while Jews are highly represented in “growth industries” such as hi-tech and finance.

· The state owned electric company prevents Arab citizens from working in the company and doesn’t permit its contractors to hire Arab employees. According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, in 1999 the company rejected an application for work with a contractor employing Bedouin citizens, residents of the Negev, on grounds that the security permit would be granted only after several months; yet foreign workers received their permits within an hour.

Military service effectively serves as a “filter” for selecting workers according to nationality, even for jobs such as typing, driving a bus, printing assistants, warehouse workers, comptrollers, etc.

· As yet, there is no known case in which the Department of Enforcement of Labor Laws in the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare submitted a claim against an employer who used this criterion to reject an applicant.