The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 50)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 50)

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34
the same sector (government). This part of his argument downplays the role of the
government in facilitating the European settler project. In fact, in 1928, and after
pressure by the Zionist Organization and the Histadrut, the government’s Wages
Commission adopted “four wage levels for unskilled labor: Arab rural, 120-150
mils a day; Arab urban, 140-170; Jewish nonunion, 150-300; and Jewish union,
280-300.”°' This was in spite of what this meant in increased costs for the
government, which was contrary to normal colonial practice.
The other part of the explanation in wage differentials between Arabs and
Jews, according to Metzer, lies in “structural and institutional factors,” some of
which are general to economic dualism and some specific to Palestine. The general
factors are the following:
(a) “hidden” productivity differences between laborers of peasant
origin and the more experienced, even if unskilled, urban workforce;
(b) “pull” effects of comparatively high-wage urban jobs coupled
with demographic pressure on rural resources and additional factors
(such as capital-market dualism) “pushing” peasants out of
traditional agriculture; [and] (c) institutional constraints such as
union power.”
To substantiate the pull effects of urban wages, Metzer calculates and
compares the “Arab agricultural product per worker in the 1930s (£P 20 in 1931,
£P 33 in 1935, and £P 25 in 1939)” with the “nonfarm wages earned by Arabs,
namely unskilled construction workers (£P 31, £P 35, £P 27 on the basis of 250
‘Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic
Policy, 1920-1929 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 156.
°Metzer, Divided Economy, 127.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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