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For years, Israeli policymakers have focused with some success on the harbadment of ultra-Orthodox men and Arab women in the labor market. But as the research of the Israel Institute of Democracy shows, fewer and fewer Arab men have jobs and their wage growth is lagging behind other Israelis.
The problem, says Eitan Regev, an economist and researcher at the Israel Institute of Democracy, is likely to worsen as the needs of Israel's high-tech economy diverge from the kind of Jobs that Israeli Arab men can accomplish because of their low levels of education.
Among Jewish workers, only 35% of men and 39% of women are employed in jobs that could be replaced by computers. For the Arab community, these figures are 57% and 39% respectively.
"Today, when the politico-security dimension is no longer the main obstacle to the optimal integration of Arab men into the labor market and to the increase of their capacity of winning, the big story is their level of formal education and its relevance to the modern job market, "said Regev in his study.
In fact, the labor force participation rate of Israeli Arab men has declined in the long run. Since such a decline in Israeli men – Jews and Arabs over the age of 15 – began to reverse about 15 years ago, Jewish men have seen their rates rise by approximately 12%, double the rate of Arab men.
The result is that last year, Arab men's activity rate was 62%, six percentage points lower than for Jewish men. The result is not a loss of manpower for the Israeli economy, but lower incomes for Arab families.
Regev traces the lowest rate among two-factor Arab men. The first is the explosive growth of Arab women in Israel's labor force, especially over the last two decades. In 1995, only 16.5% of non-Jewish women were in the labor force; in 2015, the rate was almost double.
The result was that there was less pressure on Arab men to find work if they did not feel up to the job, because they were less likely to have a job. to be the sole breadwinner of their family. In addition, as Arab women entered the labor market, they competed with men to find a job – and often obtained better credentials.
This is because their level of education has exploded in recent years. Among Arab men, only 25% have bagrut (secondary school diploma) certification, compared to 42% of Arab women. Many Arab boys leave high school to help their family at the expense of their long-term career prospects.
The gap in skills and training is manifested in compensation. In 2015, the average monthly salary of an Israeli Arab man was 8,304 shekels ($ 2,287 at current exchange rates), or 58.5% of what a Jewish man earned. In 2013, Arab men's wages were lower in real terms than they were in 2001. Arab women earned 67% of what their Jewish sisters did, said the Israel Institute of Human Rights. democracy in its report.
"Most Arabs work in physical jobs and in a relatively low technological intensity – in industry, construction and similar professions," said Mr. Regev in his report. "In these areas, especially in the industry, the rate of technological change is fast, and automation and robotics eliminate the need for certain physical tasks and the employees who perform them."
Regev said the solution is to reduce the dropout rate for Arab boys, to offer programs to entice them to technology and to spend more for school in cities and Arab villages, which tend to have smaller budgets.
The industry should also help by developing on-site training programs with the government's help to retrain workers for a highly skilled job.
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