High school teachers’ strike may ‘certainly’ last until late October, union head says
Ran Erez also says education minister ‘doesn’t understand his job’; strike, which began Sunday, affects over 500,000 students who are already behind due to years of pandemic, war
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
The high school teachers’ strike that began on Sunday could continue until after the upcoming Jewish holiday period, chairman of the Secondary Schools Teachers Association Ran Erez said Wednesday — meaning the strike might persist until late October.
Asked in a telephone interview with the Ynet news site if the strike could continue until after the holidays, Erez replied: “Correct, as we aren’t close to an agreement.”
The comment was widely shared on social media, with students, parents and teachers facing the prospect of an extended hiatus.
The Secondary School Teachers Association has for weeks been engaged in ongoing yet deadlocked negotiations with the education and finance ministries leading up to the strike, which was officially announced last Thursday.
In the interview, when asked about students having nothing to do this week because of the strike, Erez said: “It’s lucky the weather lets the students go to the beach and they are keeping busy. We don’t want to hurt the students. For us, we see this as the summer vacation continuing for another few days.”
“We are fighting for a better education system,” he said.
Erez insisted that the teachers had waited years for better conditions, saying: “In the current situation, even though we worked very hard during the COVID-19 period, during the war and during the elections which were held four times, they told us, ‘It’s not the time.'”
“But we are now three years without a collective agreement, three years in which our wages have dropped at least 8% or 9% due to inflation,” Erez said. “I want the best teachers to come into the education field, but they won’t come with these conditions, with 40 kids per class and a salary where a teacher with a BA and a teacher’s certificate starts at NIS 8500 ($2,287) per month.”
Erez said it was up to the Finance Ministry to end the strike, adding: “I am certain that not a small amount of teachers will be leaving the system, because they can’t see a future there. And we are already lacking teachers.”
When asked about Education Minister Yoav Kisch, Erez, who has led the teacher’s union since 1997, said that of all the education ministers that he has worked with, Kisch is “the weakest of them all. He doesn’t have the capability, he doesn’t even understand his job.”
Erez and Kisch, over the course of the negotiations, have repeatedly made disparaging and dismissive remarks about each other.
On Wednesday, replying to Erez on X, Kisch said that for the union head to compare the strike to summer vacation and say that it’s not the end of the world was “the most disconnected thing ever. This is how a person who can’t look students and teachers in the eye speaks, this is how a person who doesn’t feel the war outside speaks.”
“Unfortunately, he is a party to the negotiations. If that’s what he thinks, after about 30 years of strikes, it’s time for him to go,” Kisch said.
A principal’s view
“A strike is legitimate for organizations when they don’t get what they want, but at the moment, we are in a very difficult period, during a war,” explained Abigail Samin, principal of Makif Ariel, a large middle and high school covering 7th to 12th grade in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
“A lot of our high school students are in very difficult situations. The last thing they need is to continue the summer break,” Samin said, speaking to The Times of Israel by phone on Wednesday afternoon. Samin is also co-director of “Manhigim,” an umbrella organization for school principals with 2,000 members.
Because of the war and last year’s disruptions to the education system, many of the students are suffering from trauma, attention problems or other difficulties, so parents are “turning to the school system for help in a way that they never had before,” a need much more difficult to answer during a strike, she said.
And, due to the combination of difficulties over the last few years, especially the COVID lockdowns and the disruptions caused by the Israel-Hamas war, high school students are way behind in their studies, something that will be exacerbated if the strike continues for a long time, especially if the schedule for the important matriculation exams is disrupted, she said.
“The teachers are stuck,” Samin said, because they want to teach and help the students, and during the strike, they won’t receive their salaries as well, which is “very stressful.”
“Even those who might support the strike say that they need to come to an agreement,” Samin said.
The strike officially covers instructors teaching 10-12th grade, but some 9th grade classes are also reported to be affected. There are some 514,000 high school students in Israel this year, according to Education Ministry data.
The high school teachers’ strike is a separate action from the one-day general strike called by the Histadrut labor federation on Monday, which caused elementary and middle schools to close early and kindergartens to be closed completely, before a court shut it down as political.
Deadlocked negotiations
There were no new meetings on Wednesday after a Tuesday morning negotiation ended with no breakthrough.
On Tuesday, after that morning meeting ended with no results and anticipating a lengthy strike, Kisch said that the ministry would work with local authorities and youth groups to open “alternative frameworks” to hold non-academic activities for high school students.
However, a source in the Education Ministry told The Times of Israel that “no one wants this solution, because it means the strike will continue.”
“We can’t open school and bring in other teachers, so maybe there will be other activities… we are exploring a lot of options,” the source said, stressing that “nothing is decided or approved.”
The main sticking point in the negotiations is the government’s push to allow individual contracts for teachers, which they say will allow for more hiring flexibility and provide wages based on results or ability, instead of seniority.
The union has remained steadfast against this move, saying that individual agreements will make teachers into “contract workers” without the benefits or job security that teachers enjoy, allow for the hiring of unqualified teachers, and lead to lower wages, increased staff turnover and reduced quality of education.
The instructors are also demanding retroactive wage increases and other bonuses 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.
According to reports, the Education Ministry has offered to provide at least some of the wage increases and bonuses the teachers are seeking.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
