At the zero degree / Below the minimum: Wage as sign in Israel’s split labor market

Kaminer, Matan

doi:10.1007/s10624-019-09560-7

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…2 Rather, the migration regime was deliberately designed to ensure that Thais would cycle quickly out of the country, without integrating into either the subaltern or the superordinate racial group. As "becoming Jewish" would have allowed them to escape the farm sector, with its artificially depressed wages, and since "becoming Arab" would render them a politically dangerous "demographic threat," this process of neutralising racialisation can be understood as a useful one for both employers and the state (Kaminer, 2019).…”

Section: Global Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

Kaminer

2024

GLJ

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There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidating control over broad stretches of frontier, as well as the ideological purpose of emblematising the Jewish people’s return to its land (Shafir, 1989; Neumann, 2011). However, pace the emergent orthodoxy in settler-colonial studies – which has recently been subjected to strident critiques, not least in the Palestinian/Israeli context – Israeli agriculture has not, for the most part, been characterised by an “eliminationist” attitude towards indigenous labour or by a serious commitment to exclusively employing the labour of settlers.[1] In fact, Israeli agriculture, like other low-wage sectors of the economy, has nearly always depended on Palestinian labour. When the First Intifada of 1987 to 1991 convinced Israeli policymakers that this dependency was dangerous, their response was to replace it not with the more expensive labour of Israeli citizens, but with the similarly cheap and skilled labour of migrant workers. The farm sector would quickly come to recruit the bulk of its workforce from Thailand, while continuing to employ thousands of Palestinians.

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Section: Global Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

Kaminer

2024

GLJ

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“…The wage differential helps construct Thais as a distinct, racialized “human type” with needs radically different from those of citizen workers (Kaminer 2019a). The employment of such racial Others might be expected to exacerbate the settlers’ exploitation anxiety, but settlers like Yossi distinguish sharply between Arab and Thai labor in this regard.…”

Section: Settling the Arabahmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saving the face of the Arabah

Kaminer

2022

American Ethnologist

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Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler‐colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such “foreign labor” as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses, but also to enlist their own cultural resources to perform the tactful, implicit work of maintaining the settlement's public “face” as a pioneering, self‐supported Jewish community. The result, both at work and in public spaces, is a fragile, asymmetrical cultural intimacy, subtended by a convenient one‐sided misunderstanding which reflects the racial‐capitalist world‐system in which it is embedded. [agriculture, cultural intimacy, colonialism, community, facework, labor, migration, Thailand, Israel]

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“…73 Although on paper Thai migrants are entitled to the same protections as Israeli citizens, in practice the government tolerates gross violations of their legal rights. 74 In 2016, the minimum wage was 25 Israeli new shekels (US $6.33) per hour, but the prevailing wage for Thais in the Arabah was much lower, around 18 NIS per regular hour and 22 NIS for overtime, including on days longer than the legal maximum. 75 Wages were docked in legally dubious ways, peripherals like severance pay denied, and pay slips falsified.…”

Section: The Crisis Of Labor Settlement and The "Thai Revolution"mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism

Kaminer

2021

Int. J. Middle East Stud.

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Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through “Hebrew self-labor,” with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.

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At the zero degree / Below the minimum: Wage as sign in Israel’s split labor market

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

Saving the face of the Arabah

The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism

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