Education minister, union head set to meet in longshot effort to avert high schools strike
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Education Minister Yoav Kisch and Ran Erez, the chairman of the Secondary Schools Teachers Association, are set to meet in Tel Aviv at 11 p.m. along with officials from the Finance Ministry in a last-minute effort to avert the teacher’s strike Erez has called for tomorrow, the first day of the school year.
The meeting, called by Kisch, comes after Erez officially announced the open-ended strike on Thursday, which will affect high schools across the country. The discussions are expected to last deep into the night, the Calcalist news outlet reports.
The talks are seen as highly unlikely to succeed in averting the strike.
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 the still ongoing 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.
Despite the last-minute meeting, in a notice to union members sent today, Erez reiterated that “tomorrow, there will be no classes.”
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.
