Labor’s leader: I’ve been misunderstood on business issues

Though she’s an avowed social democrat, Labor Party chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich said she is on the side of Israel’s high-tech industry, which she called one of the “pearls in the crown of Israeli society” and an example of “good economic activity.”

Speaking before a crowd of several hundred at the monthly get-together on Wednesday of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a group dedicated to helping Israeli start-ups, Yachimovich said, “Industries like high-tech are our future.”

As opposed to the work done by banks and the stock market, she said, “high-tech and low tech are blessed examples of economic activity, because they create things, unlike financial speculation,” which creates nothing but trouble. “We don’t have a lot of land, although apparently we have a lot of energy resources. But our real resource is the human one.”

Throughout her career in politics, and before that as a media personality, Yachimovich gained a reputation as being antagonistic to business. A number of her positions — for example, she is a strong advocate of unionizing white-collar workers, and especially those in high-tech — point in that direction.

But Yachimovich told her audience that she wasn’t anti-business – just misunderstood. “I have nothing against Israeli high-tech; quite the opposite,” she said. “But I do believe in achieving a balance between the free market and state activity. The state, in my view, needs to act as a regulator to ensure that citizens are treated properly, and not taken advantage of.”

A good example of that, she said, was her position on enforcing laws requiring businesses to be closed on Shabbat. A sharply worded query in which her interlocutor demanded to know “who are you to tell people to take a day off if they want to work,” prompted Yachimovich to explain her position in detail.

“There are 700,000 people who work in Israel on Shabbat, and the vast majority of them are at their jobs because they are forced to be there” under pain of being fired altogether if they do not “volunteer” for Shabbat work, she said.

“Even though I am completely secular, a liberal humanist, and so on, I think that Shabbat is one of the greatest things Judaism has given the world, and the nations who have adopted our idea apparently think so too. It may have been a Divine command at one time, but today it is a social law, throughout the world and also in Israel.”

She supports places of entertainment remaining open on Shabbat. But for the vast majority of workers, Yachimovich said, “the situation is tantamount to slavery.” An exception would be a company like Intel that needs to remain open on Shabbat to operate a fabrication plant that cannot be shut down, and in such a case she would issue a license to allow that. “I am positive that the workers in that situation are getting the ‘Shabbat salary rate,’ which is 150% or 200% of their normal salaries – unlike most of the workers, who are getting paid regular rates.”

Illustrating her commitment to workers’ rights, Yachimovich told the audience how she decided to give up a job that paid NIS 54,000 ($14,000) a month. As host of Channel 2’s “Meet the Press” program, she was often required to do in-studio live shows on Saturdays. “At such a salary it was clear that I would not get paid overtime,” she said. “But the staff, the producers and camera people who were stuck working the same hours I was and were earning NIS 4,000 and 5,000 a month weren’t getting overtime either.” She left the show.

Another misunderstanding, she said, is her position on a change to the Israeli wage law that would require business to issue monthly data sheets to employees specifying the number of hours they worked and how much they earned. That law, several audience members said, is aimed directly at businesses like high-tech, where many of the workers receive a are paid the same monthly salary regardless of how many hours they work.

“Why would an employer want to hide that information? It’s not an anti-business law, but a pro-worker law,” Yachimovich said. “Workers who take home a good salary, say NIS 15,000 [about $4,000] won’t be affected, but there are many workers who earn NIS 4,000 and NIS 5,000 a month who are forced to labor far into the night and on weekends. In many cases, workers who consider themselves ‘middle class’ end up earning below the minimum wage.”

Ensuring that such things don’t happen, Yachimovich said, is the state’s job. “I realize there are opposing philosophies on this, a neo-liberal point of view that wants to see the state intervene in as few areas as possible. That is not my point of view,” she stated flatly.

Her social democratic views will get her elected, Yachimovich said. “With apologies to [political newcomer] Yair Lapid,” who has made the issue of drafting of ultra-Orthodox youth into the IDF a centerpiece of his campaign, “in numerous polls we have seen that the economy, and social justice, are considered the most important issue of the day by Israelis, while the Tal Law,” which regulates exemptions for yeshiva students, “comes in near the bottom.”

“I am the only alternative to the neo-liberalism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” Yachimovich said. She intends to win the next election, and while she probably would not join a Netanyahu government if she lost, she would invite the current Netanyahu to join her government. “On condition, of course that he becomes a Social Democrat himself.”

Yachimovich couldn’t resist discussing the hot issue of the day, the state comptroller’s report on the way the government handled the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident. The report stated that the government’s decision making process was problematic, a point she took up with gusto. “We have to say it plainly, Netanyahu and his defense minister, Barak, make their own decisions without consulting anyone. It is unbelievable how decisions on such major issues are made without consulting with experts, with other leaders. And it happens over and over.”

Appealing to the managerial sense of members of the audience, Yachimovich said, “They do whatever they want, they don’t report to anyone, and notes aren’t even taken in these meetings. I am sure that not one person here who is in charge of a company would allow their organization to make decisions in this manner.”