Israel's foreign relations are suffering these days from an outbreak of poor diplomacy. Not necessarily bad; just poor.

Foreign Ministry employees say they are just that, poor. Their basic salaries have been devalued by about 40% since last being updated in the early 1990s, and many of them rely on help from welfare services, say activists from the ministry workers' union.

The diplomats have years of experience, a stack of academic degrees and high motivation to serve. They also have families to feed and pensions to fund, and say neither is doable on their paychecks, which some revealed on a popular news site. Only an idealist or a fool would join the foreign service under these conditions, they said. Finance Ministry officials said the paychecks didn't reflect considerable extras.

Iran's former former minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was abruptly fired last week while on a diplomatic mission to Senegal, is mad as hell and isn't gonna take it any more.

In an unusually harsh criticism of his former boss, Mottaki called his dismissal by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "insulting" and "anti-Islamic."

He was replaced by Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of Iran's nuclear program, who was feted at a reception Saturday that was supposedly in Mottaki's honor.

Mottaki blew off the reception. Instead he sent a blistering text to Iranian media denying an Ahmadinejad aide's claim that he was aware that he was about to get canned.

"I was not informed about my replacement within 24 hours after I left for a trip and what is more ridiculous is the date set for the farewell and introduction ceremony," he said, according to numerous news agencies.

He called the manner of his dismissal "insulting and not according to diplomatic protocols."

Where is your Sri Lankan from?

It's a nasty old joke in Lebanon, one that gets even less funny every time a foreign maid or nanny is reportedly abused.

But activist Wissam Saliby turns this trope of casual racism on its head in a new satirical video he hopes will shine a light on the conditions of African and Asian domestic workers in Lebanon.

In Sri Lankiete Libnanieh (My Sri Lankan is Lebanese), the roles of madam and maid are switched as two spoiled housewives played by Asian women discuss the comparative laziness and stupidity of their Lebanese and Syrian maids, who are treated badly.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranians this month that "frugal" families have nothing to fear from impending economic pressures.

But just in case, his government is cracking down on labor activists who may disagree.

Three workers from the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Co. Union are facing jail time on charges of insulting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to an Iranian human rights organization. The union, formed following a massive strike in 2008 over withheld wages, has complained of continual harassment by authorities.

"It has gotten more intense, the crackdown, in the last two years, but the last two months have been worse because [the government] is getting rid of subsidies," said Mehdi Kouhestaninejad of the Canadian Labor Congress.

Landing a job interview in Beirut has proved a daunting task for 21-year old Lebanese university student Lubna Mohamad.

Not because there are no jobs, but because she is veiled, she claims.

Mohamad, who sports a casual conservative look consisting of jeans, long-sleeved shirts, nail polish and an Islamic headscarf, claims she has been turned down from no less than three recent job interviews -- over the phone -- simply because she admits that she observes Islamic dress code.

When she applied for a secretarial position at a small firm in predominantly Christian East Beirut, she says the phone conversation she  had with the office manager quickly drew to an end when she asked him whether the office would have a problem with her being veiled.

"Yes, we do," was purportedly his answer.

 

An Egyptian administrative court has upheld an earlier verdict that forces the government to set monthly minimum wage at 1,200 pounds ($207 in U.S. dollars) for public and private sector employees, most of whom earn between 200 and 500 pounds. 

The verdict, which was announced Tuesday, comes amid Egyptians' anger over soaring prices of basic food commodities, which sparked a number of minor demonstrations as inflation rates hit 11.7% last month. Employees within the public sector, who form 22% of Egypt's total workforce, have continuously voiced their dismay over their wages. The last official minimum wage was set in 1984 at 35 pounds a month ($6).

Labor activist Nagy Rashad and lawyer Khaled Ali, both members of the Labor for Change movement, filed a lawsuit earlier this year demanding that the government raise minimum wages. The court ruled in favor of the pair in March before the government appealed.

Justice Lebanese-style: A Lebanese employer in 1999 beat and burned two maids with a hot iron. 

The employer received a fine of $333. 

In a new report presented at a news conference in Beirut on Thursday, the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch offered some troubling statistics on the Lebanese justice system's track record for protecting the rights of migrant workers in Lebanon. 

The 54-page study, titled "Without Protection," concluded that the Lebanese judiciary generally failed to protect the rights of foreign maids who accuse their employers of mistreating them and that employers accused of abuse frequently go unpunished or only receive light sentences. 

The choice to clock late-night hours just like men is now a right for Kuwaiti women. 

In a revision to the labor law this week, the government of Kuwait allowed women to work night shifts at hotels, restaurants, pharmacies, press offices, banks and various other businesses.

The amendment overrides a labor law that barred Kuwaiti women from working between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Minister of Social Affairs and Labor, Dr. Mohammed Afasi, says Kuwaiti women can work until midnight in such professions as law, medicine, journalism, tourism and hospitality.

However, they still will be barred from jobs described as physically dangerous or taxing, such as those in the manufacturing, construction and petrochemical fields.

Afasi has also decreed other caveats to the labor law, including a ban on any private sector employee, man or woman, from working between 12 and 4 p.m. from June until August due to the perils of the summer sun and heat. 

These revisions come with a recent tide of other gender-conscious legal reforms that put Kuwaiti women at the forefront of gender rights in the Persian Gulf, according to a March 2010 report by Freedom House. 

Generally, they enjoy more comprehensive social and economic rights than their counterparts.

Oh, those lazy Iranians.

Say what?

A mid-ranking government official in Esfahan has riled the national psyche by proclaiming: “Iranians are lazier than the average people in the world.”

One wouldn’t think so given the steady buzz of news, including street protests, political battles over subsidy cuts and the perpetual brinkmanship and diplomacy with the international community over the country’s nuclear program. But Mohammad Reza Javadi Yegane believes his countrymen have become sloths since the days of the Islamic Revolution.

The semi-official news agency Tabnak cited Yegane, a member of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, in reminding its readers that three years ago Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned that “social laziness is the inner foe of Iranians.”

Some businessmen agree. Mostafa Bromandi, owner of a printing house, said: “My workers are lazy. Out of the eight hours I pay them, they only work two hours.... The more educated, the lazier. My accountant has a BA degree. He is the laziest white-collar worker.” 

A barber found such accusations a bit curious "On the one hand," he said, "the government complains that the holidays in Iran are the longest in the world. On the other hand .. when unrest was fomenting in Tehran in the postelection, the government announced more holidays." 

Maryam, a bookkeeper who wouldn’t give her last name, said: “Yes, Yegane is right. If we were not suffering from social laziness we should have toppled this incompetent and inefficient government.”

-- Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

Photo: Iranians in the snow on Mount Tochal overlooking Tehran. Credit: Associated Press  

 

It's going to take more than pink type to close the gender gap in the Arab work world, but creating a welcoming and user-friendly job site for women is a start.

The Kuwait-based Wasm Media launched the site after its founder, Abdulmohsen Alajmi, realized not enough women were applying to work at his firm, although he knew many were qualified.

The available data corroborate Alajmi's experience. The 2009 Global Gender Gap Report, released in October by the World Economic Forum, found that in some Arab countries, including Kuwait, more women pursue higher education than men yet still make up a minority of the workforce.

"Fora9," pronounced "foras" which means "opportunities" in Arabic, seeks to rectify the imbalance by making job-hunting easier for women. Fora9 categorizes its listings by field, including medicine, marketing and information technology, to name just a few, as well as by commitment: full time, part time, long-distance and volunteer.

But apart from its sleek interface and pastel palette, it is not immediately clear why women seeking to break the glass ceiling should use Fora9 instead of existing job sites like bayt.com, currently the top online classified service in the region.

A proposal by a conservative Bahraini political bloc to ban women from four countries from entering the country did not make the grade among Bahraini lawmakers but raised quite a few eyebrows when it was offered up.

The conservative Al Asala bloc proposed that Bahraini authorities stop issuing visas to Russian, Thai, Ethiopian, and Chinese women as part ongoing efforts to combat prostitution.

The small island kingdom began stepping up measures to curb prostitution last summer, rounding up and deporting scores of alleged prostitutes and banning one and two-star hotels from selling alcohol to prevent cheap flophouses from turning into brothels. 

Intensified efforts to put an end to prostitution in the relatively freewheeling island came shortly after a popular men's website listed Manama, Bahrain's capital, as one of the world's "top 10 cities to pursue vice and debauchery."

But despite the concern among some Bahraini parliamentarians including Adel Maawdah, who thinks prostitution is so widespread there that his country is turning into the "brothel of the Gulf," the controversial proposal was short-lived in the parliament.

On Oct. 21, 26-year-old Zeditu Kebede Matente of Ethiopia was found dead, hanging from an olive tree in the southern Lebanese town of Haris.

Just two days later, her compatriot, 30-year-old Saneet Mariam, died after falling from the balcony of her employer’s house in Mastita, just north of Beirut.

It's been a deadly month for women working as domestic laborers in Lebanon. At least six have died under mysterious circumstances, constituting a "clear pattern that cannot be ignored," Human Rights Watch researcher Nadim Houry told the Daily Star recently.