From The Haaretz: Israeli Arab women dream of the minimum wage

More than 10,000 Arab women work in agriculture through local labor contractors who pay them about NIS 100 per day for eight to 10 hours of work.

A protest in Tel Aviv last Friday was called to highlight one of the greatest disgraces in Israel - the widespread use of poorly paid contract labor. But some workers are even worse off than the garden-variety contract laborers: At the bottom of the Israeli labor scale are the Arab women known as "rais workers."

The rais, Arabic for "boss," is a kind of local labor contractor. He collects the women early in the morning in his van for harvest work. They go home after eight, sometimes 10, hours with NIS 100 to NIS 115 in their pockets, a lot less than the minimum wage. Sometimes, to create a facade of legality, they are given a pay slip that has no connection to their actual days of work.


For more, please see this: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/israeli-arab-women-dream-of-the-minimum-wage-1.393260