Zana Rabayev has been working as a cleaner at Ben Gurion University since 1994, shortly after she immigrated to Israel from Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus.  She said, "We always felt exploited but until the students explained to us about our rights, we did not realize by just how much we were losing out."

Rabayev, a mother of two, is one of 200 cleaners at Ben Gurion University who recently formed a Workers Committee and joined the Histadrut (the organization of trade unions), with support from two NIF grantees Students for Social Justice and Itach – Women Lawyers for Social Justice and organizational and media consultancy from SHATIL.  Almost all the cleaners are female immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union.

The cleaners earn the minimum wage, $5.50 an hour, but Rabayev said that conditions have already improved since the Workers Committee was formed last month.  She said, "The sub-contractors that employ us have already been forced to pay for vacation time and pension rights.  For all these years I never got paid for one day's holiday or if I was sick."

However, Michal Hochberg of Students for Social Justice noted that the subcontractors are now trying to increase the workload to compensate for providing new benefits.  She said, "The solution we now seek is to have the cleaners employed directly by the university rather than through subcontractors."

With this goal, the 200 cleaners came to Jerusalem on Wednesday to demonstrate outside of the Ministry of Education.