Ministry of Economy and Industry | Directorate General of Labor

ANNUAL SUMMARY REPORT 2021

Diagram 15 | Queries from Palestinians 300

2

250

200

150

35

249

112

100

50

109

43

0

2021

2019

2020

Employees

Employers

RIA – Abrogating the Exclusion of Palestinian Workers from the Obligation of Providing Suitable Accommodation and Medical Insurance

According to Section 6c (1) of the ForeignWorkers Law-1991, employers are not legally obligated to provide medical insurance and suitable accommodation for Palestinian workers. In other words, the employer of a Palestinian worker is exempt from these obligations towards the worker. As a result of the Covid crisis and restrictions imposed on the movement of Palestinian workers that subjected their employment to accommodation in Israel, a temporary order was adopted in August 2020 as Amendment 21 to the Law. This temporary order also obligates employers of Palestinian workers to provide them suitable accommodation and medical insurance as they are obligated to do for any of their other foreign workers in Israel. The Temporary Order was intended to enable the construction, agriculture, industry and services sectors that employ large numbers of Palestinian workers to continue their activity while safeguarding the social rights of their workers despite the lockdown imposed due to the Covid pandemic. The preparatory work ahead of the Temporary Order's legislation revealed an existing practice for handing Palestinian workers permits to sleep overnight in Israel during routine periods that resulted in the number of such permits reaching tens of thousands. It was therefore decided to examine the possibility of permanently abrogating the exclusion for Palestinian workers with a permit who sleep over in Israel during the week. The Commissioner's Unit began initiating a procedure of Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) on the revocation of excluding the Palestinian workers from employers' obligations to provide their workers with suitable accommodation and medical insurance, as stipulated in Section 6c (1) of the Law. This procedure is intended to assess the importance and impact of the proposed regulation. The current RIA process began in 2021.

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