Sawt el-Amel uses an integrated, rights-based approach to fighting economic poverty and discrimination. In all spheres of their work, Sawt el-Amel uses the following strategies, depending on the priorities and objectives of the activities:

• application of gender perspective;
• information in three languages (Arabic, Hebrew, and English);
• combination of advocacy, awareness-raising, education and empowerment;and
• networking with local and international partners.

Their three projects - the Laborer’s Legal Clinic, the Alternative Wisconsin Centre and the Alternative Solutions Initiative - are closely interlinked and draw from each other's resources.

1. Laborer’s Legal Clinic - is Sawt el-Amel’s legal department, the organisation's main resource to counteract direct and indirect discrimination in Israel's legal system. The Clinic deals with both individual and collective cases involving mainly labour or social insurance law. Lawyers represent members of the Palestinian community in Israel’s court system, including the Supreme Court, and deal with complaint procedures at the National Insurance Institute, the employment bureaus and against employers. The Laborer’s Legal Clinic campaigns for fair wages, safety at the workplace, proper work contracts and non-discriminatory social legislation and its implementation. The Laborer’s Legal Clinic tries to prevent future discrimination and exploitation of Palestinian citizens of Israel by information and awareness-raising campaigns on the local and international levels and by pressurising decision-makers in Israel.
2. Alternative Wisconsin Centre (AWC) - conducts information campaigns in the local media, runs a full-time legal advice centre, keeps an archive of testimonies of Wisconsin Plan participants, organises community events and is part of a Knesset lobby group against the Wisconsin Plan. The organisation's website explains that the Wisconsin Plan is a 'welfare-to-work' plan that was supposed to help the long-term jobless, who are dependent on income support, to break out of the cycle of unemployment and economic poverty through job placements. The organisation argues that lack of employment opportunities, low levels of education, low workforce participation among Arab women, and insufficient work support services such as transportation and childcare make a sustainable implementation of the Plan impossible. Sawt el-Amel facilitated the establishment of the Women’s Platform on the Wisconsin Plan, a solidarity forum for women that advises Sawt el-Amel in its strategic planning and organises community events. The Women’s Platform is also a forum for discussing alternative solutions for achieving self-sufficiency. After the first six months of the Wisconsin Plan in Nazareth and extensive field surveys and consultations with the participants of the Plan, the main goal of the AWC is to stop the Wisconsin Plan and to campaign for an alternative and sustainable job creation and job readiness programme for Nazareth and other Arab population centres inside Israel.
3. Alternative Solutions Initiative - the goal of this initiative is to provide ways for Sawt el-Amel’s constituency, specifically women, to achieve economic self-sufficiency as equal citizens in a democratic state. Sawt el-Amel organises empowerment and information activities and offer a a safe space for disadvantaged women in the Nazareth region to discuss ways to bring about social and economic change. The initiative includes empowerment forums and grassroots think tanks that aim to create new income-generating projects.

Sawt el-Amel produces a number of publications to support their goal. News, updates and calls for action aim to keep people informed about labour issues. 'Laborer of the Month' is a monthly case study about members of Sawt el-Amel's constituency. Other publications (many of which are available on the Sawt el-Amel website) include reports, information brochures and fact sheets.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used as an advocacy tool as well as a means of disseminating information. Following announcements in local Arabic newspapers, on July 28 2006 Sawt el-Amel opened an emergency telephone hotline for labour and national insurance law in the hope of helping workers and victims of the war being waged between Israel and Lebanon. Sawt el-Amel launched this initiative in response to the conviction that, due to their national identity and harsh socio-economic situation, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are particularly affected by the violent conflict, as they are confronted with increased racism for and lack access to public services and information. (On July 27 2006, the Israeli government published guidelines for compensation of workers and employers in northern Israel who are affected by the war. However, all these announcements do not reach the majority of Arab citizens, in part because the guidelines as well as the compensation application forms are available only in Hebrew. According to Sawt el-Amel, workers who cannot reach their workplaces, and direct victims of the violence, feel insecure and do not know what to do and whom to approach.) On the first day, the organisation received more than 50 phone calls.

Sawt el-Amel expects that the need for legal action will arise from the cases received by the emergency hotline, as many Arab citizens will be denied their rights to compensation through bureaucratic obstacles or will be unlawfully laid off by their employers. Sawt el-Amel's existing Legal Clinic will be prepared to defend its constituency's socio-economic rights on individual and collective levels. They will also conduct a broad awareness-raising campaign on labour and national insurance law in Arabic, and, as a last resort, cases will be taken to court.

Economic Development, Rights

According to Sawt el-Amel, marginalisation and exclusion based on systematic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs by the Israeli state and the general public constitutes a continuous threat to this community’s socio-economic well-being: 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian, and less than 5% of the state budget is spent on this community; In 2001, 46 of 47 towns with higher-than-average unemployment rates were Palestinian; in 2003, 46% of Palestinian families in Israel lived below the official poverty line, compared to 15% of Jewish families.

Sawt el-Amel states that in 2004, the Laborer’s Legal Clinic won cases for 420 welfare recipients and effected the reimbursement of US$80,000 to exploited construction workers by their insolvent employer.