Ben Gurion Airport staff to halt flights in brief Sunday strike

All incoming and outgoing flights at Ben Gurion International Airport will be suspended for two hours Sunday morning, as employees strike in solidarity with Israel Broadcasting Authority workers facing layoffs.

The action between 10am and noon Sunday is an effort to spotlight Knesset legislation that would shutter Israel’s state broadcasting company and terminate its 2,000 employees.

“The legislation allowing for the layoffs will result in the closure of the IBA and would severely damage public broadcasting in Israel,” Histadrut Labor Federation Chairman Avi Nissenkorn, said according to Israel’s Maariv website.

Earlier this month, staff at Ben Gurion called off a threatened strike after reporting progress in negotiations with management over the employment of contract workers at Israel’s international airport. Workers had planned to shut down outbound services at the airport for 24 hours, potentially leaving some 30,000 passengers on 200 flights stranded during Israel’s busy tourist season.

Last year, the Knesset approved legislation to abolish the IBA and replace it with a new public entity.

The bill’s sponsor, then-communications minister Gilad Erdan, explained at the time that the need for the change stemmed from the broadcast authority becoming increasingly unnecessary. Erdan said a new public entity would save money and do away with the unpopular television tax.

The IBA was established in 1948 and held a monopoly on TV and radio broadcasting in Israel until the 1990s.

Since 1965, any Israeli household with a television set — whether used for cable, satellite or solely for watching videos — was obligated to pay an annual television tax which helped fund the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA). Today, the tax stands at NIS 345 per year ($100). The IBA strictly enforced this rule, ignoring pleas from TV owners who did not use IBA’s services or were not connected to any television service whatsoever.

In March last year, the Knesset Finance Committee delivered a scathing criticism of the IBA after it became known that the broadcasting authority spent NIS 30 million ($8.6 million) in 2013 on attorney fees in order to chase down missing payments, Maariv reported. The IBA’s TV tax collections in 2013 came to approximately NIS 461 million ($132 million).