Khinvraj Jangid :
Israel’s desperate search for foreign labor in the aftermath of the Hamas October 7 assault and ensuing war with Hamas in Gaza has led it all the way to India. Thousands of its foreign workers fled back to their home countries because of the fighting, the same fighting that led the Israeli government to bar many West Bank Palestinians from entering the country.
The joint platform of central trade unions and federations issued a strong statement against ‘exporting’ Indian workers to replace Palestinian workers, describing Israel as responsible for what they term as “the settler colonial occupation of Palestine” and say it “is shamelessly escalating its genocidal attack against Palestinians, rejecting appeals by the United Nations or even their master, the United States, for a ceasefire”.
Shri Ashok Singh, the senior national vice president of the Indian National Trade Union Congress, told journalists, “the Palestinian workers are ill-treated and deprived of their rights, we can help them, but not harm them by taking away their jobs”.
In a show of solidarity, The Center of Indian Trade Unions and All India Trade Union Congress, representing more than 100 million Indian workers, held an “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” in late November. In another act of protest, India’s Water Transport Workers’ Union, representing workers of 11 major ports of India, declared they would refuse to load or unload any kind of arms and weaponized cargoes heading to Israel from any other country.
The problem is, the unions are not taking so much a “power to the workers solidarity approach”, despite their allyship with Palestinian workers, but a lopsided, heavily politicized one, using terms like “genocide” and calling the U.S. Israel’s “master”.
Moreover, the unions’ statement, and other related comments by union officials, do not address atrocities inflicted on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7 which included extreme violence, killing and kidnapping of children and women, or blame Hamas for staging the attack that prompted to Israel to launch what it calls a war of self-defense against it.
If that was not enough of a gaping omission, surprisingly, the statement does not call out Hamas for killing several foreign workers from countries including Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines, and Cambodia. These were workers from India’s own region who were killed on October 7 and if they are going to speak of workers’ solidarity, this omission is a grave one.
The unions are also trying to use this issue as a political weapon against the powerful government of Narendera Modi. He, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a good relationship. The unions have been fighting the privatization and free-market economic model of Modi government for years. The government’s decision to send workers to Israel in a time of war gives the unions ammunition to attack Modi.
Tapan Kumar Sen, the General-Secretary criticized the government, saying “It is a PR exercise by Modi to please his Israeli counterpart”.
But the unions also know there is an acute shortage of work in India regardless and appetite for jobs abroad despite their statements and protests.
Indeed, the Indian government and thousands of workers do not seem to be too worried about the position of the unions. They see great opportunity in the Israeli labor shortage.
Modi’s government has already started recruiting workers. States like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, governed by the Bhartiya Janta Party, have already registered thousands of workers who plan to join the construction sector in Israel.
Even before the Gaza War, India signed an agreement with Israel to send 42,000 workers to Israel primarily for the construction sector when then foreign minister Eli Cohen visited India in May 2023. There was no objection then voiced by Indian trade union and labor unions.
The two prominent northern Indian states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh recruited thousands of construction workers – among them masons, painters, electricians, plumbers, and some farmers too, and in the end more applicants showed up than they could accommodate. One recruitment center there had to call the police to manage the crowd of job applicants. Many applying to come work in Israel said they were not worried about their safety. Harpal Singh, one such young worker, said, “So what if there is a war going on in Israel? Unemployment is also a war [in India]”.
At the moment, India is in a precarious economic situation – because although economy is doing well terms of GDP, which is expected to grow to five trillion dollars in the next three years and to seven trillion dollars by 2030, it faces a problem many developing countries face: it’s not producing enough jobs. According to the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy, the unemployment rate in India was around eight percent in 2023, but in rural areas its 44 percent among 20 to 24-year-olds.
The prospects of a job in the Israeli construction industry (even though it is one of the most dangerous industries in Israel) is seen as a golden opportunity by many Indian workers. India does not have enough work or work at good wages. Higher salaries in Israel for such workers is a major incentive, as is the trust and affection for Indian workers in the country already, most of whom work as caregivers, among everyday Israelis.
In my research into early Israeli-India ties in the 1950s and 1960s, I’ve seen just how close India’s trade unions and labor movement worked together with their counterparts in Israel, even though India didn’t yet have diplomatic ties with Israel.
Unlike the current Indian trade and labor unions, which are under the influence of communist parties, they were then led by socialist-democrat and Gandhian leaders who engaged with Mapai, Israel’s Labor Party, and the country’s network of kibbutzim. Representatives of the Histradut, Israel’s national trade union, visited many of India’s cooperative communities in those decades.
Despite the condemnation from the unions we see today, what we saw then was a remarkable case of socialist solidarity that forged ties between the workers of India and Israel that served a key advocacy role for establishing official relations between the countries.