A physically ugly blight on the neighborhood is the huge dumpsters, overflowing with garbage, that stand on or by the neighborhood’s streets. These are especially unpleasant and unsanitary in Baka’s commercial areas, specifically along Bethlehem Road’s cafés, shops, and produce stands. In many cities, garbage disposal bins are located inside buildings or underground. Perhaps it’s difficult to get the garbage out of sight because of the neighborhood’s history, its narrow streets, and its old stone structures. The owners of the businesses along Bethlehem Road have resisted changes that would cost them money, even though the overflowing garbage bins (and the rats) must be deterring potential customers. Garbage disposals are not only outside but they are part of people’s home too, and when they overflow or break it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, luckily homeowners can visit this site to set a home warranty plan, but it is not as easy for a general garbage disposal that the residents all use.
One moral blight on the neighborhood is the underage workers, most of them Arab kids, that one sees working in the stores and on the streets. These boys, many of them well under 16, should be in school; their presence at workplaces is illegal and wrong.
The two blights presented themselves together one night this week when I attended a meeting of our neighborhood council’s environmental committee. One of the main items on the agenda was finding solutions to the garbage disposal problem. As we spoke, the floors of the community center where we were meeting were being mopped by an Arab boy no more than twelve years old.
When I called the community center staff’s attention to the boy, they replied that he worked in the building most weeknights. His father, a cleaner sent by a subcontractor, brings his son along to help out.
The meeting was not a particularly encouraging one. Some of the Baka residents who serve on the committee said that they’d worked extensively on neighborhood improvement plans that were ignored by the city government. Others noted that the city has little money to invest in garbage disposal, so the chances of getting rid of Bethlehem Road’s garbage bins are not good. So far, the owners of the street’s commercial establishments have shown no interest in discussing solutions.
I did my small part. When I got home, I wrote a letter to the community council’s director, Dorit Shitrit. I pointed out that having an underage boy cleaning the community center building at night is a violation of labor laws. Recent court rulings in Israel, I reminded her, have mandated that institutions that employ cleaning workers via subcontractors are liable if labor laws are violated-even though the workers are not directly employed by them. And I noted that if the neighborhood council expects citizens and businessmen to obey the law, it must first obey the law itself.
I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Ms. Shitrit the next morning. She thanked me for sending the letter and said that she’d taken the subcontractor to task for allowing the worker to bring his son to work in the community center on a regular basis. She assured me that she’d be watching to make sure that the violation did not continue.
It’s not much, but it’s one less blight on Baka.