The Stratifying Trade Union by Shaul A. Duke

Author:Shaul A. Duke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The excerpt above shows how Histadrut labor market discriminatory practices occurred on the local levels of union organization, and originated from pressure from the Ashkenazi workers. Whether it was at the worksite, where Ashkenazi and Yemeni workers would come into direct and sometimes violent clashes, or at the Histadrut local employment agency , Yemenis witnessed how Ashkenazi workers set to exclude them, and how local Histadrut personnel backed them up. This discrimination was carried out by the local workers’ council , which, besides controlling the employment agencies, also controlled the LTUs. These had a pool of jobs available only through them, which they allocated to a limited number of eligibles.17 This dual control rendered the local workers’ council very powerful, and discrimination within it, extremely damaging.

The Histadrut leaders at the convention refrained from responding to the allegations made of the Histadrut’s organs repeatedly succumbing to Ashkenazi workers’ discriminative demands. Instead they issued a list of resolutions that put forth a rural self-work solution (to be dealt with below) as the remedy for the Yemenis’ dire straits (HH 26/2/1922, p. 26). Yet by 1922 these leaders should have already known that the process of allocating land is a lengthy and complicated one, and that in any case this solution does not attend to urban Yemenis, who constituted the majority of Palestine’s Yemenis. The Histadrut’s leadership clearly failed to recognize the severity of the Yemenis’ discrimination by the Histadrut’s local levels, and the sense of urgency it created in this community.

While the Histadrut’s leadership continued to endorse the self-work solution (HH 30/6/1922, p. 5), Yemeni trust in the Histadrut was rapidly deteriorating. Five months after the Yemeni-Histadrut convention , Gluska —a Histadrut-affiliated Yemeni leader—addressed the convention and its aftermath in a letter to the editor of a daily newspaper (DH 16/7/1922, p. 4). He repeated the allegations made at the convention, and made it known that since the convention, the Histadrut had selectively been coming in contact with the docile part of the Yemeni leadership. His general stance was that the Yemeni worker had nothing to gain from being a Histadrut member, since the Histadrut was not addressing Yemeni discrimination. This notion was apparently shared by the Yemeni public, which at large refrained from Histadrut membership during that period (HH 23/1/1923, p. 12). The Yemenis’ widespread stance against Histadrut policy was further voiced by Tabib (a top Yemeni leader), who quit the Histadrut in protest, at the end of his speech at the 1923 Histadrut convention (Maabi 2009, p. 57). By then allegations against Histadrut organs’ discrimination against the Yemenis were finding their way to the Jewish Labor Movement press (e.g. HH 12/1/1923, p. 4), which up to that point categorically refrained from publishing such claims. Moreover, the truthfulness of some of the allegations was being acknowledged by some of the Histadrut’s top leaders—Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi (Maabi 2009, p. 57).

Yet these acknowledgments came too late, as the Yemenis’ bitter disappointment (Kessar 2001, p. 177) led to their organizational divorce from the Histadrut.

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