Yossi Barabi: Imagine yourself as a cleaner whose head is in the toilet all day for only NIS 5300

“I am appealing to Minister of Finance Smotrich and the Ministry of Finance to allow the signing of extension orders that will improve the wages and conditions of hundreds of thousands of workers in the economy,” Yossi Barabi, chairman of the Histadrut Security, Cleaning and Domestic Workers Union, said yesterday (Tuesday). “The fact that these extension orders are not authorized causes injustice to these transparent workers. This is the only engine that will allow us to help hundreds of thousands of transparent workers in the economy.”

“These workers earn NIS 29.12 per hour,” Barbie protested. “Think of a family that lives on 5,300 shekels. Imagine yourself as a cleaning worker whose head is in the toilet all day or with the mop, and that’s what he lives on. The state needs to look at it differently. It can’t be that there will be millions in the coffers, and the people will be poor. It’s a social issue.”

Extention orders in Israel are a mechanism that authorizes the Labor Ministry to extend a sectoral agreement and to all employers in that industry, unionized and non-unionized. In recent years, several sectoral collective agreements have been signed, in the cleaning, domestic care, catering, and building sectors, which await the signing of extension orders and depend on them to enter into force.