Israel jobs scheme needs reboot, with inputs on skills, better monitoring

On Tuesday, The Indian Express reported how the jobs scheme — launched to plug the labour shortage in Israel’s construction sector following the ban on Palestinian workers — has begun to unravel, mainly due to glaring gaps in the assessment and selection process that often led to skill mismatch: a case of over-promise and under-delivery at work sites. Srivastava is among the around 500 workers in the scheme who are said to have already returned home.

Given how both sides have thrown their weight behind the programme, the task ahead is cut out, say Israeli construction executives and Indian manpower agencies who spoke to The Indian Express.

Some of them point to the Sri Lankan model of providing additional training in skills for a couple of weeks before departure. And there are suggestions from Indian agencies to send foremen and supervisors along with workers for better communication and efficiency.

These suggestions assume significance given that Israel has approached India again to carry out another recruitment drive for 10,000 construction workers, according to a statement issued by National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) on Tuesday.

As The Indian Express reported yesterday, NSDC said the second round of recruitment for construction workers is slated to take place in Maharashtra. A team of assessors from Israel’s Population, Immigration, and Border Authority (PIBA) is expected to visit India in the coming week to carry out the skill tests, NSDC said.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Srivastava, the worker from Siwan, said, “I was tested for my skill in shuttering, but once I arrived at the construction site of a commercial tower in Ashkelon, I was assigned jobs like welding, tiling and sweeping. There was no point in protesting since the Chinese supervisor could not understand my problems. In all, I worked for 12 days and had no work for 18 days. Towards the end, I had an altercation with the Chinese supervisor who told me to return to India.”

Srivastava’s case was shared by the Indian Embassy to Indian Gorkhaz Company, an NGO working for welfare of Indian citizens and run by Israel-based Naren Thapa. Before taking the flight home, Srivastava recorded a short video asking Indian workers without the required skills not to come to Israel. Several such videos and SOS messages are now doing the rounds on workers’ WhatsApp chat groups and websites of such NGOs in Israel.

“There is a serious problem brewing here,” Thapa, who took Srivastava to the airport, told The Indian Express. “I get distress calls from builders who complain about the lack of skills and discipline of Indian workers, mostly those coming through the G2G route and from panic-stricken workers. I would advise all those who may have been selected to understand that once they join duty on construction sites, they have to match the working methodology of this country,” he said.

G2G (Government-to-Government) through NSDC and B2B (Business-to-Business) under the Ministry of External Affairs are the two pathways identified for this bilateral scheme. But now, the mismatch in skills has led to the Israeli government allowing those brought for construction to work in other sectors – even as the Indian side attributed the rerouting to new openings emerging in related sectors.

Responding earlier to queries on the first phase of recruitment from The Indian Express, an NSDC official said, “It has been proposed by the Israeli side that the candidates may be moved to other sectors related to construction only i.e. infrastructure and renovations as there are vacancies in these sectors also, subject to the consent of the candidates…”

The NSDC official also pointed out that Israeli “assessors” were present when professional “tests” were conducted for candidates in India and that those selected were put through “pre-departure orientation training.”

In Israel, tracing the origins of the scheme, Igal Slovik, CEO of Israel Builders Association (IBA), recalled that once the spectre of a paralysed construction sector was upon them after the Hamas attack last October, the association estimated the need for 40,000 foreign workers.

“We did not want to put all our eggs in one basket so decided that we should urgently recruit, say, 20,000 workers from India and maybe, 5,000 each from Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan,” said Slovik, who was among the office-bearers who visited India for talks with NSDC and to supervise the selection of workers.

But the IBA chief says the “reputation’’ of Indian workers has now gone down and there is need for some “course correction”. Looking back, he says it would have been ideal for more B2B workers to be “embedded” in the construction sector before the bulk of the G2G workers were brought in.

What Israel wants

Slovik now has three “prerequisites” for future recruitment from India: workers should be above 25 years old, have previous construction experience in countries other than India and undergo one or two months of pre-departure training.

As for the estimated 500-600 workers who have returned to India, Slovik said this “should not be considered so worrisome” since 10,000-12,000 Indian workers had arrived in Israel.

Besides, he said, Israel has taken a “good” decision to transfer those who do not fit as construction workers into industry and renovation. “I feel India too needs to do what the Sri Lankans did when their workers were faced with a similar adjustment problem: they need to have one or two weeks pre-training in their specific skills before they land in Israel. And what has happened should not be looked upon as a problem but a challenge,” he said.

It’s a line that companies recruiting through the B2B pathway are already tapping. In Delhi, candidates “cleared” by leading manpower recruitment company, Dynamic Staffing Services, are put through two-day training, including a crash course in Hebrew. The candidates have to also show that they have experience of 5 years of working on construction sites in other countries.

“The government should also decide to send Indian supervisors and foremen with every batch due to the hardships the Indian workers have been facing in Israel,” said Vijay D’Souza, Senior Manager of Mangaluru-based 4 Corners Manpower Agency which has sent 30-40 workers with construction experience abroad to Israel.

Yet, companies handling B2B recruitment admit that their dispatch of workers has reduced to a “trickle”. And G2G workers, who spoke to The Indian Express from Israel, say hardly any flights carrying Indian workers were landing in Tel Aviv now.

Undeterred, ready to fly

But that has hardly affected the line of workers in search of the Israel dream, as The Indian Express found during a visit to the head office of Dynamic Staffing in Delhi’s Dwarka.

Dynamic Staffing is one of the 11 companies selected by Israel for recruiting construction workers directly through a list of 168 HR firms under the B2B route. And this newspaper came across several workers, including a batch from Gujarat, who were getting ready to fly to Tel Aviv.

They included 28-year-old Ashutosh Kumar Gupta from Delhi who said the expenses – ticket, charges for paperwork and certificates – were high. “But this is because the salary being offered is much higher. I have worked as an office boy and storekeeper in Saudi Arabia where I was earning Rs 28,000 a month. In Tel Aviv, I can easily earn more than Rs 1,50,000,” he said.