UN relief workers strike in Jordan demanding pay hike.

by israeli.agent | April 20, 2009 at 06:17 pm

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Employees of UNRWA, the agency responsible for educating Palestine refugees in Jordan went on a day's strike demanding hike in salaries and better health care.

The agency appealed last November to oil-rich Arab states in the Gulf to help meet a 160-million-dollar projected budget deficit in 2009.

UNRWA’s largest programme is education and most of it's funds are going to this programme.

98 % of UNRWA’s employees themselves are refugees.

Nearly 7,000 United Nations employees staged a one-day strike in Jordan on Monday, demanding pay raises to meet soaring food and fuel prices and high inflation.

The protest by employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which helps Palestinian refugees, forced the closure of 174 schools run by the agency and responsible for educating some 140,000 Jordan-based Palestinian boys and girls under the age of 14. UNRWA's 24 clinics were also closed.

UNRWA _ which was created after Israel's foundation in 1948 _ provides Palestinian refugees with basic and vocational education, primary health care and relief and social services.

It now cares for 4.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants living in camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Of the total refugees, Jordan hosts the largest number _ 1.9 million Palestinians _ displaced in two wars with Israel since the 1948 Mideast war.

One of the striking UNRWA employees said the agency did not raise salaries this year, despite soaring inflation, which doubled to 13 percent, and an across-the-board spike in prices, particularly for food and fuel.