NEW DELHI – Israel has turned to India and Sri Lanka in its search for much-needed workers to revive its largely comatose construction industry, after the country deported thousands of Palestinian workers and revoked their work permits following Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on it.
Around 82,000 Palestinians worked in the country’s construction industry prior to the assault, accounting for a third of the sector’s workforce.
Left without these workers – as well as another 2,000 from China and Eastern Europe who returned home after Oct 7 – construction sites across Israel have gone quiet, significantly denting the country’s economy. The labour shortage has been exacerbated by the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists for the war against Hamas.
The Israel Builders Association (IBA) estimates that the industry, one of the country’s biggest economic sectors with a market size valued at US$71 billion (S$94 billion) in 2022, has been operating at just 15 per cent of its pre-war capacity.
This has brought urgency to the recruitment of fresh foreign workers, and representatives from IBA will be in India and Sri Lanka next week to screen applicants for various roles such as plastering, ceramic tiling, building formwork and iron bending.
“The goal is bringing 10,000 (workers) very quickly to Israel because time is running (out) and we are already in a big, big problem financially,” Mr Shay Pauzner, IBA’s deputy director-general, told The Straits Times on the phone from Tel Aviv.
These workers are expected to be in Israel by the end of January, as “we are working very fast because the situation is very, very dire”, he added.
They are part of a batch of 30,000 new workers that the Israeli government has allowed the IBA to recruit from different countries.
On Dec 15, the Haryana Kaushal Rozgar Nigam, a government recruitment agency in the Indian state of Haryana, put out an advertisement calling for construction workers for Israel.
It did so after the Indian government’s National Skill Development Corporation wrote to the state on Nov 25 about a requirement for 10,000 construction workers in Israel, citing it as an example of its “strategic engagements” with foreign governments to enhance international workforce mobility for Indians.
A spokesperson for the recruitment agency said it had received applications from 2,994 candidates as at Dec 20, which was the last day to send in applications.
At least two other Indian states, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, have also begun preliminary work to select potential construction workers for Israel.
Israel’s construction and agricultural sectors have been heavily reliant on foreign, including Palestinian, workers. Around 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and an additional 17,000 from the Gaza Strip had permits to enter Israel legally for work.
Mr Pauzner said the construction industry needs an estimated 100,000 workers to return to its pre-war capacity. “The picture is very bad right now. About 75 per cent of the building sites are working at a very slow pace and at around 40 per cent to 50 per cent of them, there is either no work at all or very little work,” he added.
The Times of Israel reported on Dec 20 that the authorities announced the arrival of more than 12,000 new and veteran foreign workers. They include more than 1,000 Thai and 100 Sri Lankan workers for the agricultural sector.
In November, Sri Lanka forged an agreement with Israel to allow the immediate hiring of 10,000 Sri Lankan farm workers.
On Dec 19, during a telephone conversation with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also “discussed advancing the arrival of foreign workers from India to the State of Israel”.
Source link : https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/israel-targets-indian-sri-lankan-workers-to-replace-deported-palestinians
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Publish date : 2023-12-23 03:00:00
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