September 21, 2000
How 60 Israeli Women Managed to Dump the Boss By DEBORAH SONTAG
IZPE RAMON, Israel, Sept. 18 — At the edge of the largest crater in the Negev, this isolated town draws nature lovers, artists, spiritual seekers and immigrants with nowhere else to settle. "The stars talk to you here," one sculptor said, "and you are tempted to talk back."
As a manufacturing center, though, Mizpe Ramon's time has come and gone.
Its industrial zones stand as skeletal remains in a harsh, lunar landscape, where some warehouses are occupied by art studios, some by ashrams. In the deserted industrial park at the entrance to town, only one factory remains, and in August, 60 immigrant women barricaded themselves inside to make sure it did not close.
The women — from Morocco, India, Iraq, Russia and the Caucasus — had spent years hunched over aging sewing machines there, stitching collars and pockets onto army uniforms for minimum wage. It was repetitive, mind-numbing work. But it was work, and they were a community, and when their children dressed to report to military service, they saw their handiwork and were proud.
That is why the 60 women, humiliated one too many times by the factory owners who came and went, rose up and took Israel by surprise.
When they received their latest in a series of letters of dismissal, the women decided instead to dismiss the owner. They soldered shut the warehouse doors so that the equipment and back orders could not be removed, and they took up vigil inside. In shifts, they talked, ate, laughed, slept and celebrated the Sabbath, their children zooming through the cavernous building on bicycles.
Eventually, television cameras, politicians and national union leaders began traipsing there, and the women became a national cause célèbre, good-natured spokeswomen for several neglected sectors of modern Israel: the dying blue-collar industries, the faraway immigrant development towns, even the desert that has never quite bloomed in the way that David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister, intended.
Today, sitting at the workstations whose numbers served as their names, the women sipped Champagne from plastic cups, shaking their heads in disbelief. This was almost their factory now. They were signing on the dotted lines to become the first textile cooperative in Israel, the first all-female cooperative and the first one in ailing Mizpe Ramon.
"Today I am a boss," Malka Simantov said, beaming, 22 years after she first started at the plant, on opening day. "We are all bosses. And believe me, we are not going to call the girls by their numbers or snooze in the office while they sweat. It will not be easy. But for the first time in our lives, we women will be in control of our destiny."
Mizpe Ramon is about 30 miles south of the humble cabin in Sde Boqer to which Ben-Gurion, an ascetic, retired when he left government. In the spirit of his vision for the desert, pioneers built a town there in 1956, only to be followed by Moroccan and Romanian immigrants who had no choice.
The government settled them there in cinder-block housing projects, part of a plan to spread the population throughout the land. It also granted business owners financial incentives, including cash grants, tax breaks and lucrative government contracts, to invest and create jobs in Mizpe Ramon and other development towns.
The system of subsidies was intended to make the businesses eventually self-sustaining, but the model did not work in many places, especially as the Israeli economy shifted to become increasingly high-tech and white-collar. Once the government demanded that the businesses generate a profit rather than merely sustain a population, many could not compete with manufacturers abroad. Factories began to shut down.
Mizpe Ramon, unlike other development towns, could trade on its natural beauty — and its crater, a phenomenon of nature. It converted to a tourist economy, albeit a tiny one. The army placed an officers' training center nearby, and now some 40 percent of the population is military.
But old immigrants find it hard to move, and new immigrants are still settled here by the government. So, with unemployment more than 10 percent, each minimum-wage job is defended as if it is a longtime resident of the town.
"How can you love a job where they make you bring your own toilet paper?" asked Havazelet Ingbar, a mother of four. "Well, we did. We were making uniforms for the soldiers. My son would come home on leave and straighten the collar that his mother had sewn on."
Mrs. Ingbar, 42, who was born in India, always prided herself on her manual dexterity; she can attach a collar to a shirt in 30 seconds. But as the petite firebrand who led the women's revolt, she proved herself politically dextrous, too, and great on camera.
In recent years, the factory has had but one contractor: the Israeli Army. It used to get a million-dollar contract to produce military work uniforms, but the army has gradually reduced the size of its order because of budget cuts and because it has been buying more uniforms from the United States — in compliance with the purchasing requirements attached to military aid grants.
For several years, each time the military cut the contract, the current factory owner, Moshe Partok, would serve the women with letters of dismissal, they said. Then, joined by a local labor council head, Danny Sheetrit, and a worker, generally Mrs. Ingbar, he would travel to the Defense Ministry to argue for the life of the plant. The contract would be increased, and the factory would go on.
This year Mr. Partok refused the ministry's slightly enhanced order. "When I saw the size of the order, I said, `That's it,' " Mr. Partok said, explaining that in the last three years, the factory has lost $125,000. "I feel the pain of the workers. But you have to understand, I had no choice. I couldn't go on losing money."
After the visit to the Defense Ministry, however, the women felt that Mr. Partok was playing games, "exploiting us and the state," they said. That is when they barricaded themselves in the windowless factory, which looks like a hangar, with neon lights hung high over the worktables piled with khaki fabric. And that is when Mr. Sheetrit brought the case to the attention of the Histadrut union federation's leader, Amir Peretz, who is also a member of Parliament.
Mr. Partok sought $200,000 for his business. Potential buyers demanded the government's assurance of a $775,000 contract, which the government would not give. So Mr. Peretz visited the factory and stunned the women by suggesting that they take over the factory themselves. He offered a long-term floating loan of $200,000 — which the union considers a write-off and does not expect to recover. Nervously, they agreed; they had, after all, been running the place for years under largely absentee owners.
Today, before signing, they battered the union officials with questions. If the company gets off the ground, they were told, they stand to earn a far better living. If it fails, they will be no worse off than they are now, the officials said. Addressing immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the officials acknowledged and tried to assuage their concerns about collective enterprises.
Mr. Partok says he thinks the union is misleading the women. Without a recovery plan that entails dismissing half the employees, he says, the business will not survive. But because of the sensation that their case has caused, the women expect to start off with more orders than Mr. Partok could ever secure: civilian as well as government contracts.
During the signing, for instance, Nir Rubin, a businessman from Eilat, appeared, prepared to give them an instant contract for $70,000 worth of hotel supplies. "I want to keep the work within the country's limits," he said. A couple from the Haifa area showed up, too, offering free economic counseling. "They touched our hearts," said Anat Cohen, a worker.
After the Champagne and pretzels, Mrs. Simantov scurried around cleaning up and preparing lunch for the male union bosses. Old habits die hard. She was in a sensational mood, though, humming as she worked.
"That man thought he was working with dummies," she said. "He never thought the dummies would throw him out and take over the joint."