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Workers of the World United to Benefit Israeli New Home Buyers
or Israeli New Residential Complexes Are United Nations Made
Not to miss: Rehovot writer perspective below
"Nikolai the Bulgarian, Su the Chinese, Sergei the Ukrainian and Vincenzo the Romanian enter the construction site. They make coffee and swap work experiences - in Hebrew. No, these are not the opening lines of a joke. This is the reality of construction sites in Israel. It is six in the morning and construction workers are already making their way to the sites, cloaked in a range of outer garments, for it is freezing cold outside. By 6:30 they have all made it to their work places at Merom Ganim in Petah Tikva, a construction project of the America Israel real estate firm being built by the Tidhar company. The morning's black coffee is already brewing.
Last year, the issue of foreign workers was on the public agenda a number of times. Contractors argued that the number of workers approved for construction was too small, and demanded the quotas be raised. At the same time, the state sought to reduce as much as possible the number of foreign workers employed in construction, to open up jobs for Israelis. In addition, reforms in employment of foreign workers were launched in June 2005, intended to bring order to the practices in the construction industry. The reforms prompted steep cost hikes in employing foreign labor in construction.
Spending a single day at a building site demonstrates that the "foreign" workers are not all that foreign. They speak Hebrew and are well acquainted with Israeli culture, although they have their reservations about it. Spending time with them demonstrates the hard work and tough terms of employment. For example, contractors maintain they offer fair employment, citing wages of $7 per hour in construction work. Workers, however, tell of being paid NIS 19.50 per hour [just over $4], if they adhered to terms specified by the contractor.
After the coffee, it's time for the safety briefing. Foreman Avi Mizrachi must get the new workers to sign off on the briefing. One of the workers is kind enough to explain that the purpose of this is "to cover one's ass," as he slaps his behind for emphasis. As a new Israeli worker I receive a briefing in Hebrew. Mizrachi proudly shows me a binder of signed safety briefings in Chinese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian and other languages.
Shades of Hebrew
"Okay, y'allah, let's get to work. Today we're going to tear you apart," Mizrachi informs me, along with Nikolai Vasilev the amiable Bulgarian, Mizrachi's right-hand man at the site and his representative to the rest of the workers. We go down to the storage shed to get a hat and gloves that are full of mold. "What needs we do now," Nikolai explains in his brand of Hebrew. "This prepares material for Chinese. Not telephone Avi. Confuses when there is no material, no work. There is material, there is quiet." Freely translated: "Prior to the arrival of the flooring, plumbing, electrical, plastering and other contractors, material must be prepared for them, such that they will be available on the specific floor of the building that is currently under construction" - as Mizrachi explains, "so that they can do the work on the double, and won't jerk us around saying they have no materials, delaying all the work for me."
We begin hefting, grouting, plaster and sand from one room to another and from the first floor to the fourth. Just as I am hoping it's about to be over, Nikolai shows me the next room. Afterwards, clean-up time begins, an activity the workers take seriously. "This is important," Nikolai says. He answers my question "Why is this important?" while muttering a few curses at Sergei for taking his broom. "If not cleaning, plaster black." Mizrachi translates: "If dirt and too many grains of sand remain next to the plaster, this adheres to the wall, preventing the preparation of the wall from being smooth and clean."
The distribution of labor at the site is geographic in nature. The Romanians are the experts in plaster, the Chinese are responsible for plastering ceilings and installing floors, and Sergei the Ukrainian and Nikolai the Bulgarian are in charge of preparing the materials and keeping the site clean.
The hands of the clock have yet to hit 10 A.M., when Mizrachi begins his supervision rounds of the work site, to check everyone is working as they should. The first visit takes place on the seventh floor, with Vincenzo, Ural and Valentin the Romanian plaster "artists," as Mizrachi describes them.
First room: Ural plasters with Romanian pop music and the fragrance of strong black coffee in the background. Mizrachi calls him Casanova, because "that's the name that stuck to him. They tell me he comes on to all the girls." From the Romanian Casanova we went to Vincenzo, a smiling, personable fellow whose plastering is a work of art.
"As far as he's concerned, every wall is music," Mizrachi says. "They [the Romanians] are the best plasterers."
I decided to try the work for myself. When the wall wound up bereft of plaster, while the floor was piled high with the gray stuff, Mizrachi elected to forgo my training as a plasterer, lest it result in further damage to his project.
Chinese whispers
Two flights above, the Chinese are working on plastering the ceilings and installing flooring. Mizrachi walks about, examining the work, then calls out to one of the workers, who is called Sagur. Mizrachi shows Sagur the floor tiles, telling him to replace all the flooring near the walls, because "it's not close enough to the wall."
Sagur argues a bit, finally gives in and starts to replace the tiles. "They're always testing your limits," Mizrachi says. "If you compromise, they try to stretch the limits more and more. Therefore, you have to be firm from the start."
Asked the source of the name Sagur [which in Hebrew means closed], Mizrachi says, "His eyes are always closed, so the last foreman called him Sagur. Since then, everyone on the site calls him Sagur, and no one has any idea what his real name is. But he's okay with that, we're okay with that, and everybody's happy."
It appears the Chinese enjoy, in fact, love entertaining themselves, laughing among themselves at everyone, in Chinese.
When asked what they think about when they are working, they murmur something in Chinese. I ask if they miss their homes, they simply straighten their glance and hint that I should leave them in peace.
From the incomprehensible jokes of the Chinese I am delivered straight into the hands of Nikolai, who tells me he is a ceramicist from the Bulgarian city of Botevgrad, some 50 kilometers from the capital Sofia, that he is divorced, 46 years old, the father of a 16-year-old girl and that he is proud of his Czech girlfriend, who is 26. Nikolai, who has been in Israel for five years, lives in Rosh Ha'ayin. He has worked with Mizrachi since Mizrachi was foreman at the Denia Sibus construction company. Nikolai misses his home, especially his daughter. He has no warm words for his ex-wife. "She is floor-tile cold," he says.
The notion that people adjust to any situation and any place finds precise expression here.
According to Mizrachi and Nikolai, at the start of their path together, they communicated with a blend of sign language, English and a smattering of Hebrew words. Mizrachi confides "It was a little tough then, but the work got done regardless. Today, our communication is entirely in Hebrew, with me throwing in a word of English every now and then."
NIS 19.50 an hour
The foreign workers earn NIS 19.50 an hour, provided they meet the work goals set for plastering, flooring etc. per hour. The object of the contractor is to complete the work as quickly as possible within the "indices," the work goals or quotas that represent an incentive to faster workers, who can thus earn the same wage in fewer hours of work.
Today, Mizrachi's workers are meeting the indices and then some. But Mizrachi still has a problem. Nikolai and the Romanians are coming to the end of their legal stays in Israel. With this in mind, Mizrachi has begun training his Chinese workers to plaster walls. However, Mizrachi says, "It's not the same as with the Romanians. The Chinese aren't as good. But that's all there is."
Mizrachi adds that he would very much like to work with Israelis. "It's easier to communicate with them," he says. As a result of the imminent departure of Nikolai and the Romanians, Mizrachi has readied a crew of Israeli Arabs from Nazareth with whom he worked on his last job.
Most obvious on the building site was the fact that all the workers, Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian, speak to each other in Hebrew. The most prominent Hebrew words are: "Tazuz po [Move here], "Cakha lo" [Not like that] and "Tasim kan" [Put it here]. To the outside observer, the atmosphere on the site seems very good - everyone laughs, they enjoy themselves, they are in fine spirits and joke with each other, at times in a kind of Hebrew, at times in a kind of English. The curses, however, are spoken in Russian, which in the mouths of the Chinese sound like a type of hot soup."
Source: Tzally Grinberg. Workers of the world unite. Haaretz.com (21 November 2005) [FullText]
...and yet another opinion. by Rehovot writer:
"Lomedet o ovedet?""Do you work or study?"Down the block, next to the Tenure Tower (much to the residents' chagrin), three new apartment towers are going up [at the cross of Rehov Herzog and Hanassi Harishon Street]. The noise of the work begins each morning around six o'clock, and doesn't finish until after dark. Most of the workers are from southeast Asia; occasionally, as they sit on the curb, waiting for the van to pick them up after their shift, they give exhausted glances to passerby. Ha'aretz has an interesting look [see above] at a day in the life of one such group of workers... From the looks on their faces and the white construction dust on their clothes, I suspect that this is a far less cheery existence than the article paints it."
Source: Erin Israel. "Lomedet o ovedet?""Do you work or study?" Rehovot.blogspot.com (22 November 2005) [FullText]
Not to miss: Rehovot writer perspective below
"Nikolai the Bulgarian, Su the Chinese, Sergei the Ukrainian and Vincenzo the Romanian enter the construction site. They make coffee and swap work experiences - in Hebrew. No, these are not the opening lines of a joke. This is the reality of construction sites in Israel. It is six in the morning and construction workers are already making their way to the sites, cloaked in a range of outer garments, for it is freezing cold outside. By 6:30 they have all made it to their work places at Merom Ganim in Petah Tikva, a construction project of the America Israel real estate firm being built by the Tidhar company. The morning's black coffee is already brewing.
Last year, the issue of foreign workers was on the public agenda a number of times. Contractors argued that the number of workers approved for construction was too small, and demanded the quotas be raised. At the same time, the state sought to reduce as much as possible the number of foreign workers employed in construction, to open up jobs for Israelis. In addition, reforms in employment of foreign workers were launched in June 2005, intended to bring order to the practices in the construction industry. The reforms prompted steep cost hikes in employing foreign labor in construction.
Spending a single day at a building site demonstrates that the "foreign" workers are not all that foreign. They speak Hebrew and are well acquainted with Israeli culture, although they have their reservations about it. Spending time with them demonstrates the hard work and tough terms of employment. For example, contractors maintain they offer fair employment, citing wages of $7 per hour in construction work. Workers, however, tell of being paid NIS 19.50 per hour [just over $4], if they adhered to terms specified by the contractor.
After the coffee, it's time for the safety briefing. Foreman Avi Mizrachi must get the new workers to sign off on the briefing. One of the workers is kind enough to explain that the purpose of this is "to cover one's ass," as he slaps his behind for emphasis. As a new Israeli worker I receive a briefing in Hebrew. Mizrachi proudly shows me a binder of signed safety briefings in Chinese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian and other languages.
Shades of Hebrew
"Okay, y'allah, let's get to work. Today we're going to tear you apart," Mizrachi informs me, along with Nikolai Vasilev the amiable Bulgarian, Mizrachi's right-hand man at the site and his representative to the rest of the workers. We go down to the storage shed to get a hat and gloves that are full of mold. "What needs we do now," Nikolai explains in his brand of Hebrew. "This prepares material for Chinese. Not telephone Avi. Confuses when there is no material, no work. There is material, there is quiet." Freely translated: "Prior to the arrival of the flooring, plumbing, electrical, plastering and other contractors, material must be prepared for them, such that they will be available on the specific floor of the building that is currently under construction" - as Mizrachi explains, "so that they can do the work on the double, and won't jerk us around saying they have no materials, delaying all the work for me."
We begin hefting, grouting, plaster and sand from one room to another and from the first floor to the fourth. Just as I am hoping it's about to be over, Nikolai shows me the next room. Afterwards, clean-up time begins, an activity the workers take seriously. "This is important," Nikolai says. He answers my question "Why is this important?" while muttering a few curses at Sergei for taking his broom. "If not cleaning, plaster black." Mizrachi translates: "If dirt and too many grains of sand remain next to the plaster, this adheres to the wall, preventing the preparation of the wall from being smooth and clean."
The distribution of labor at the site is geographic in nature. The Romanians are the experts in plaster, the Chinese are responsible for plastering ceilings and installing floors, and Sergei the Ukrainian and Nikolai the Bulgarian are in charge of preparing the materials and keeping the site clean.
The hands of the clock have yet to hit 10 A.M., when Mizrachi begins his supervision rounds of the work site, to check everyone is working as they should. The first visit takes place on the seventh floor, with Vincenzo, Ural and Valentin the Romanian plaster "artists," as Mizrachi describes them.
First room: Ural plasters with Romanian pop music and the fragrance of strong black coffee in the background. Mizrachi calls him Casanova, because "that's the name that stuck to him. They tell me he comes on to all the girls." From the Romanian Casanova we went to Vincenzo, a smiling, personable fellow whose plastering is a work of art.
"As far as he's concerned, every wall is music," Mizrachi says. "They [the Romanians] are the best plasterers."
I decided to try the work for myself. When the wall wound up bereft of plaster, while the floor was piled high with the gray stuff, Mizrachi elected to forgo my training as a plasterer, lest it result in further damage to his project.
Chinese whispers
Two flights above, the Chinese are working on plastering the ceilings and installing flooring. Mizrachi walks about, examining the work, then calls out to one of the workers, who is called Sagur. Mizrachi shows Sagur the floor tiles, telling him to replace all the flooring near the walls, because "it's not close enough to the wall."
Sagur argues a bit, finally gives in and starts to replace the tiles. "They're always testing your limits," Mizrachi says. "If you compromise, they try to stretch the limits more and more. Therefore, you have to be firm from the start."
Asked the source of the name Sagur [which in Hebrew means closed], Mizrachi says, "His eyes are always closed, so the last foreman called him Sagur. Since then, everyone on the site calls him Sagur, and no one has any idea what his real name is. But he's okay with that, we're okay with that, and everybody's happy."
It appears the Chinese enjoy, in fact, love entertaining themselves, laughing among themselves at everyone, in Chinese.
When asked what they think about when they are working, they murmur something in Chinese. I ask if they miss their homes, they simply straighten their glance and hint that I should leave them in peace.
From the incomprehensible jokes of the Chinese I am delivered straight into the hands of Nikolai, who tells me he is a ceramicist from the Bulgarian city of Botevgrad, some 50 kilometers from the capital Sofia, that he is divorced, 46 years old, the father of a 16-year-old girl and that he is proud of his Czech girlfriend, who is 26. Nikolai, who has been in Israel for five years, lives in Rosh Ha'ayin. He has worked with Mizrachi since Mizrachi was foreman at the Denia Sibus construction company. Nikolai misses his home, especially his daughter. He has no warm words for his ex-wife. "She is floor-tile cold," he says.
The notion that people adjust to any situation and any place finds precise expression here.
According to Mizrachi and Nikolai, at the start of their path together, they communicated with a blend of sign language, English and a smattering of Hebrew words. Mizrachi confides "It was a little tough then, but the work got done regardless. Today, our communication is entirely in Hebrew, with me throwing in a word of English every now and then."
NIS 19.50 an hour
The foreign workers earn NIS 19.50 an hour, provided they meet the work goals set for plastering, flooring etc. per hour. The object of the contractor is to complete the work as quickly as possible within the "indices," the work goals or quotas that represent an incentive to faster workers, who can thus earn the same wage in fewer hours of work.
Today, Mizrachi's workers are meeting the indices and then some. But Mizrachi still has a problem. Nikolai and the Romanians are coming to the end of their legal stays in Israel. With this in mind, Mizrachi has begun training his Chinese workers to plaster walls. However, Mizrachi says, "It's not the same as with the Romanians. The Chinese aren't as good. But that's all there is."
Mizrachi adds that he would very much like to work with Israelis. "It's easier to communicate with them," he says. As a result of the imminent departure of Nikolai and the Romanians, Mizrachi has readied a crew of Israeli Arabs from Nazareth with whom he worked on his last job.
Most obvious on the building site was the fact that all the workers, Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian, speak to each other in Hebrew. The most prominent Hebrew words are: "Tazuz po [Move here], "Cakha lo" [Not like that] and "Tasim kan" [Put it here]. To the outside observer, the atmosphere on the site seems very good - everyone laughs, they enjoy themselves, they are in fine spirits and joke with each other, at times in a kind of Hebrew, at times in a kind of English. The curses, however, are spoken in Russian, which in the mouths of the Chinese sound like a type of hot soup."
Source: Tzally Grinberg. Workers of the world unite. Haaretz.com (21 November 2005) [FullText]
...and yet another opinion. by Rehovot writer:
"Lomedet o ovedet?""Do you work or study?"Down the block, next to the Tenure Tower (much to the residents' chagrin), three new apartment towers are going up [at the cross of Rehov Herzog and Hanassi Harishon Street]. The noise of the work begins each morning around six o'clock, and doesn't finish until after dark. Most of the workers are from southeast Asia; occasionally, as they sit on the curb, waiting for the van to pick them up after their shift, they give exhausted glances to passerby. Ha'aretz has an interesting look [see above] at a day in the life of one such group of workers... From the looks on their faces and the white construction dust on their clothes, I suspect that this is a far less cheery existence than the article paints it."
Source: Erin Israel. "Lomedet o ovedet?""Do you work or study?" Rehovot.blogspot.com (22 November 2005) [FullText]
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