ToI exposes a multi-million-dollar industry in which foreign workers are compelled to pay ‘placement fees’ to employment ‘brokers’ – with the government’s full knowledge

It is close to midnight and Natalia, an Uzbek woman in her late 40s, is finally on a break from her job as a live-in carer for a wheelchair-bound elderly Israeli woman.

But instead of putting her feet up, Natalia is already at her second — illegal — workplace. Balancing a mop inside a bucket of soapy water, a spray bottle of detergent on her arm and dust cloths draped over her shoulder, she wipes down the gleaming floors and grand mirrors in a downtown Tel Aviv apartment building.

She tells The Times of Israel that she is working these two jobs to climb out of debt from an almost $10,000 “placement fee” — an illegal charge she was compelled to pay six years ago to an employment agency’s shadowy “broker” in order to obtain a job in Israel.

“If I complain, the authorities will not do anything; the only person who will lose out is me,” she says. “There is no justice here.”

Almost every Israeli family is familiar with foreign care workers who arrive to look after aging and ailing relatives. Hailing from the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine and other countries, they occupy a room in the apartment and stay with their charges every day, all day. But otherwise, they are effectively invisible in public life.

Few realize that almost all of these foreign workers are victims of a multi-million-shekel criminal industry taking illegal brokers’ fees that is operating both in Israel and abroad. The illicit business extorts money from would-be caregivers — people who are often driven by financial desperation to leave their families and loved ones and travel to Israel — to secure jobs for them here.

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