Hagada Hasmalit

Newspaper delivery (paper boy), which in the past was work done by students or young people before or after military draft, is increasingly becoming the employment of people with families, who are mainly middle-class men in and around their 40s. Many are academically educated and have regular, permanent full-time day jobs. Many drive new family cars to this early morning delivery job. The exploitative conditions are largely illegal with a net wage often under the minimum. Although a man has to be economically desperate to fill this job, an increasingly large part of newspaper deliverers come from the so called established middle class.

In 2004 the hotlines for Migrant Workers and Kav LaOved petitioned the High Court of Justice against the State of Israel and Yilmazlar International (a Turkey-based construction company), demanding that the “offset” agreement between Israel and Turkey, nicknamed “Tanks for Turks”, be cancelled. The agreement, reached in 2002, is in essence a human trafficking agreement. According to the deal, the Israeli military Industry (Ta’as) would upgrade about 200 tanks for Turkey. As part of the agreement, 800 Turkish workers were granted permits to work in construction in Israel, exclusively employed by Yilmazlar. The petition was filed by attorneys Naomi Levenkron and Yonatan Berman from the Migrant Workers Hotline, and by attorney Dr Yuval Livnat from Kav LaOved.