Finance minister, teachers union trade blame as strike set for first day of school year
Union chief Erez vows to secure collective agreement; Smotrich accuses him of playing power games, threatens to not pay wages during action
Israel’s secondary schools teachers union on Thursday formally declared a strike action for September 1, the first day of the school year, after negotiations over teachers’ salaries and contracts failed to produce an agreement.
Ran Erez, long-time chairman of the Secondary Schools Teachers Association, made the announcement in a notification to members of the country’s largest teachers’ union.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich personally appealed to teachers to not go ahead with the strike and accused Erez of playing power games rather than seeking to resolve the ongoing dispute.
No further negotiations were scheduled with the school year scheduled to start this coming Sunday, September 1.
“Due to the persistent refusal of the Finance Ministry to sign a collective agreement with us regarding increased wages and working conditions for teachers,” the union will suspend the start of the school year for upper grades, impacting grades 10-12, Erez said in the missive.
The union has been engaged in ongoing yet deadlocked negotiations with the education and finance ministries, with instructors demanding retroactive wage increases and other benefits that were agreed upon before the last school year began, but which were deferred due to Hamas’s October 7 attack and the outbreak of war.
The union is also seeking a collective salary agreement, a major sticking point in the negotiations, while the government has pushed for individual contracts for teachers amid a budgetary shortfall.
Erez did not specify how long the strike would continue but vowed: “We will continue the struggle as long as it is necessary. We will take care of and support the community of teachers and administrators during this struggle.”
Earlier, Smotrich published a video on social media in which he urged teachers to not follow Erez’s lead.
“I implore you to start the year,” Smotrich said, arguing the importance of a functioning education system amid the ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “The people of Israel need it, your students need it. Certainly now in wartime, they need a strong, supportive education system that will help them and all of us deal with the difficult period of war.”
He attacked Erez, claiming the union chief “is not fighting for your benefit or for the benefit of the education system. He is fighting for his ego, power, and control.”
Smotrich also threatened that when an eventual agreement is reached he will see that it includes a clause denying teachers wages when they are on strike.
“Any workers’ organization is allowed to shut down the economy, but it has to bear the consequences — and not get paid,” he said.
Channel 13 reported that with a strike looming, Education Ministry officials mulled seeking a court order to force the teachers to show up, but the ministry is not expected to take that action.
Erez is to meet with the head of the Federation of Local Authorities umbrella group chief Haim Bibas on Friday, Kan reported.
Erez had already all but declared a strike on Wednesday when he told Kan in an interview that “the teachers’ organization will not open the school year. We are on strike.”
He told the broadcaster that he is still open to negotiations with the Education Ministry and Finance Ministry, but stressed that the government must “bring us an offer that we can accept. There is currently no date for another meeting. They are stalling. The government does not want to pay and they want a strike.”
In a letter sent Wednesday to teachers, Education Minister Yoav Kisch outlined some of the government’s proposals to avert a strike and blamed the “unnecessary insistence by Ran Erez and the teachers union regarding personal contracts” for derailing negotiations.
Individual contracts are “an accepted practice that maintains stability and fairness” in the workplace and are part of salary agreements at many government offices, Kisch argued.
The Secondary School Teachers Association represents educators working with students in grades 7-12. According to statistics provided by the Education Ministry, some 514,000 students are registered at high schools for the upcoming school year and 335,000 at middle schools.
Strikes over salary disputes delaying the start of school studies have become commonplace in Israel.
Last year, with mere hours to go before the start of the school year, high school teachers and government officials reached a deal to bump up salaries, avoiding a threatened strike that would have delayed classes.
But the government failed to honor those agreements, citing the cuts brought on by the war.
In 2022, a separate teachers union that represents elementary and middle school teachers nearly delayed the start of the school year before the Treasury agreed to raise their salaries.
The 2024 budget slashed millions of shekels in funding from government ministries, including the Education Ministry, instead directing them toward displaced residents of the south and north amid the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
The Education Ministry faced a cut of NIS 38,283,000 ($10.3 million) in July.
