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Monday, May 07, 2012

UNRWA employees in Jordan go on strike, again

From Al Arabiya:
The majority of Jordan’s 7,500 staff at the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency began an open-ended strike on Sunday after the management failed to meet their demands for better pay and conditions.

“The employees started their open-ended strike today after talks with the management failed,” a top UNRWA official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees, including teachers and medical staff, “have been demanding a $140 salary raise, and they do not want their annual bonus cut,” the official said.

The strike forced UNRWA’s 172 schools in Jordan to close, affecting 123,000 pupils.
Remember, the vast majority of "refugees" in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship - meaning that they aren't refugees at all!

In other words, there is no sane reason for most of the UNRWA camps in Jordan to exist nowadays even if you accept the absurd idea that descendants of refugees are refugees themselves. Their only purposes are to prolong suffering (to pressure Israel) and to discriminate between Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin and "normal" Jordanian citizens.

As it stands, there are no plans to reduce the number of people on UNRWA's rolls. In fact, UNRWA has no mechanism to take away "refugee" status from any of the people it is responsible for.

So we can expect more and more of these strikes by people who feel entitled to hold on to their artificial jobs for an agency whose existence should have ended in the early 1950s.