Thinking About Consequences

Yesterday, around 6 am, I was in a car in the Tel Aviv area, when I saw a mass of men sitting by the side of the highway. The following conversation took place in the car:
Father: Look at all those Arabs waiting for work. I can't believe Jews hire them.
Son: Of course Jews hire them. They'll work for cheap, even for below minimum wage, sometimes even for ten shekel an hour. (Note: This is about 3 dollars an hour.)

Israel does not have official discrimination against its Arab citizens.* Israeli Arabs are represented in Israeli universities and the Israeli parliament more proportionally than African Americans and Hispanics are in American colleges, and more proportionally than African Americans are in Congress. Yet there is much unofficial discrimination: The idea of a half-Arab Israeli prime minister is laughable. The construction and paint industries, along with other manual industries, are dominated by Arab workers, to the point where there even was a joke about it in the Oscar-winning short film, "West Bank Story".** Illegal immigration from Thailand, the Philippines and China has forced the Arab workers to become more competitive when pricing their wages - ie, to work for even less money.

For a moment, I had an image of myself unionizing the Arab workers. I had an image of myself saying, "So-and-so will only work for minimum wage." I had an image of myself trying to restore to people the sense of human dignity which backbreaking labor for little pay can often shatter. But then I realized: If I did that, the probability is that the bosses would simply not hire the Arab workers. They hire them because they can get away with illegally paying them less than minimum wage. If they had to pay minimum wage, they'd look for other workers. So the Arabs would lose their jobs and livelihoods, and going from poverty to even worse poverty.

At least, that would be the short-term consequence. But in the long term, maybe we would succeed: Maybe they would permanently unionize and wind up making it standard practice for them to be paid minimum wage, at least. Most liberation movements are bad for people in the short term, during the movement, but worth it afterwards. Think about the civil rights movement and people languishing in prison, or even the Exodus: After Pharaoh made the Jews build their own bricks as punishment for their new notions of freedom, the Jews all rose up against Moses. But he sure did help them in the long term by leading them to eternal freedom.

So how do you measure the consequences of your actions, especially when those actions can immensly impact the lives of others?

* I would like to distinguish between Israeli Arab citizens, who live in Israel proper, and Arabs who live in the territories won in 1967, who do not have Israeli citizenship.
** I highly recommend the film