6th April: women workers

It's Monday and now I get my weekend, or in fact the nearest I've had to a break in several weeks.
The last two days have been sad and mad. I've spent them in the company of the amazing Salwa from KavLaOved, interviewing women who work in the Israeli settlements – in industrial zones like Barkan and Mishor Adumim, and in agricultural settlements in the vast swathe of stolen land that is the Jordan Valley.
These women are strong but the stories they have to tell are dreadful. Working condition s in the settlements are the kind of thing you're used to reading in scandalised Guardian reports from China and India. Terrible health and safety conditions, including exposure to pesticides, factories with no air conditioning in the roasting temperatures which are common here in summer, or no heating in the bitter cold of the hills in winter, and machinery with the safety guards taken off. Rates of pay a third of the Israeli minimum wage, which a court ruling says should apply in the settlements, and 12 or 14 hour days without proper overtime pay. Bullying and harassment by managers – both Israeli and from Palestinian middlemen and gangmasters. Uncompensated workplace injuries. The list goes on.
And, of course, these women also experience prejudice in their own communities. In the factories and agricultural packing houses around Jericho, at least women working outside the home is something well established in society, but in the tiny village in Salfit governorate to the north of the West Bank the women I met were the first amongst their neighbours to be employed, and they faced disapproval because of that. But all of them experienced discrimination for working in the settlements themselves, seen as somehow collaborating. The effects of this included many of them being regarded as unmarriageable, or only marrying too late to have children; one woman whose family's dire poverty meant that sometimes her children went without proper food for days said that despite this her daughters were considering quitting their settlement jobs for fear that they would never get husbands. But there is no work in the village, and mental health problems have stopped her husband working for over 20 years. So what are the household going to live on?
The women I met in Salfit are part of a legal case against their employers, an international bedding manufacturer called Royalife, which ships to Europe and the USA. So maybe the report I'll be writing for Women Working Worldwide can form part of some efforts to campaign for them to be reinstated (they were fired for continuing the legal case against their employers for their illegally low pay and poor safety conditions). But it's a difficult balance here; the boycott campaigners would obviously be saying that those products shouldn't be sold at all. But who else is going to bring these women jobs? The more time I spend here, the fewer ideas I have about what the answers might be.
And somehow it all seems all the worse for the heartbreaking beauty of the setting. The desert in the Jordan Valley is stunningly vast and mountainous and stark, while the hills of Salfit are covered with spring wildflowers and olive trees and should be the most serene and lovely place, if they weren't the backdrop to brutal extremist settlers and terrible poverty and military occupation and these labour abuses.