From the Liveblog of
Friday, September 6, 2024
High school teachers’ strike to continue into a 2nd week on Sunday
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
The open-ended high school teachers’ strike will continue on Sunday, union head Ran Erez says in a message to members.
The strike began on Sunday, September 1, the first day of the school year, and each subsequent day Erez has sent a notification that the action would continue for another day.
On Wednesday, Erez, who has been head of the Secondary Schools Teachers Association for decades, admitted in a Ynet interview that the strike could continue until after the October Jewish holiday season.
In anticipation of a lengthy strike, this week Education Minister Yoav Kisch said that the ministry would work with local authorities and youth groups to open “alternative frameworks” on Sunday for non-academic activities for high school students.
The union and the education and finance ministries have been in deadlocked negotiations for weeks. The main sticking point 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 turn 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 devastating 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.
