Israel Plans To Open Vacancies For Foreign Workers, Especially For High-tech Industries

Israel's Minister of Finance, Avigdor Lieberman. (photo: twitter)

JAKARTA - Israel plans to import foreign workers for its high-tech sector as an attempt to compensate for the labor shortage in the pandemic era. Israel's Finance Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that on Monday, December 13.

In remarks to his party's legislators, Lieberman said Israel was experiencing a labor shortage across the economy as a whole during the coronavirus pandemic. Employers began demanding concrete actions from the government, including work permits for foreigners.

"We will do some kind of experiment in the high-tech sector. We will agree to bring in foreign workers, even for the high-tech sector," Lieberman said in the interview, which was broadcast on Israeli television and quoted by Reuters.

Lieberman did not provide figures or a timeframe for trials in Israel's booming high-tech industry, which has already garnered up to $25 billion in profits this year.

Foreigners are currently not allowed into Israel in a bid to slow the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

Avi Hasson, CEO of Start-Up Nation Central, a non-profit group that follows Israel's tech ecosystem, said the sector suffers from "a fairly chronic shortage of tens of thousands of employees".

Salaries in the technology industry in Israel are said to be much higher than the average for other countries, and the sector employs about 10% of the national workforce. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said he hoped the figure would rise to 15%.

Local technology companies in Israel are currently competing for jobs with hundreds of multinational companies with R&D centers in Israel, including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Intel. This leaves the need for a technology workforce very open in Israel. Interested in working there?