ILO Donor Meeting Puts Palestinian Jobs and Worker Rights at Center of Recovery Plan

GENEVA — An International Labour Organization partners’ meeting on November 10 sought financial and technical commitments for a four-year Palestinian recovery program built around employment, labor rights, enterprise survival and social protection. The meeting placed workers and their institutions inside the recovery debate at a moment when the destruction of livelihoods has made decent work a central material question, not a secondary development concern.

The gathering was co-convened by ILO Director-General Gilbert Houngbo with Qatar and the Netherlands. Palestinian representatives included the Ministry of Labour, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Palestinian Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture. According to Palestinian news agency WAFA, the appeal was designed to link urgent humanitarian action to longer-term recovery while keeping jobs, rights and social protection at the center.

The ILO’s Decent Work and Recovery Programme for 2026–2029 covers Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Its priorities include emergency employment, the recovery of local enterprises, stronger social-protection systems and labor-market institutions capable of enforcing rights. That architecture matters because rebuilding workplaces without rebuilding worker power would leave the recovery vulnerable to low wages, informal employment and decisions made far from the people expected to do the work.

The labor-market collapse is enormous. A joint United Nations–World Bank damage and needs assessment estimated that nearly three quarters of Gaza’s pre-conflict employed population had lost their jobs. It put the employment-to-population ratio at 9.3 percent, reported that more than 80 percent of employees were unable to work, and found that more than 60 percent of workers had been displaced. These figures describe not only lost income, but the dismantling of the social networks, skills and workplaces on which any locally rooted recovery depends.

FILE PHOTO: Palestinian workers at the Erez crossing, July 25, 2005. Zero0000 / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Source and provenance

Earlier this month, Palestinian ministries and the ILO also launched a national social-protection platform with unions, employers, civil-society groups and international partners. The platform is intended to coordinate policy and financing rather than leave assistance fragmented among short-term projects. Its value will be measured by whether it reaches workers shut out of formal employment, including displaced families, women and young people. Clear eligibility rules, accessible registration and public reporting will be necessary if the platform is to build trust and prevent urgent support from becoming dependent on political connections or irregular donor cycles.

For labor, the political test is whether reconstruction becomes a public, rights-based project or a contractor-led market for cheap and precarious work. Donor pledges can restore productive capacity, but money alone cannot guarantee decent jobs. Workers’ organizations need real authority in setting priorities, monitoring contracts and defending wages, safety and freedom of association. Palestinian enterprises also need access to finance and infrastructure so that recovery spending circulates through local communities instead of leaking outward.

That demand for worker agency is consistent with the Palestinian unions’ recent call for coordinated international labor action. It also echoes the struggle to protect health services and workers at Qalqilya Hospital. In both cases, labor rights are inseparable from the institutions that allow communities to survive.

The Geneva meeting therefore creates an opening, not a result. Its importance depends on whether commitments are delivered, transparently tracked and directed with Palestinian workers rather than merely on their behalf. A recovery plan that treats employment, social protection and collective rights as infrastructure would do more than rebuild individual workplaces: it would strengthen the capacity of Palestinian society to shape its own economic future.