From the Liveblog of
Sunday, September 1, 2024
High school teacher’s strike to go ahead tomorrow, union head says
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Israel’s high school teachers will begin their planned strike tomorrow, the first day of the new school year, despite a last-minute negotiation session with the Education Ministry, says Ran Erez, chairman of the Secondary Schools Teachers Association.
Erez; Education Minister Yoav Kisch; Federation of Local Authorities chief Haim Bibas; and Efraim Malkin, the commissioner for wages and work agreements at the Finance Ministry, attended a meeting tonight in Tel Aviv in a last-ditch effort to avert the strike, which Erez officially called on Thursday.
“There is no possibility to sign a collective agreement overnight, even if an unexpected miracle happens and our demands are met. Without a signed, perfect agreement, the struggle won’t end, therefore the strike will stand and take place as planned tomorrow,” Erez said in a late-night statement.
The last-minute negotiations were widely not expected to avert the strike.
Kisch subsequently issues a statement attacking both Erez and Smotrich.
“After the emergency meeting and the nighttime negotiations in which I ordered another compromise outline, I came to the conclusion that both Finance Minister Smotrich and Ran Erez desire the strike,” he asserts, adding that they are locked in an “ego battle” and are “harming students and teachers.”
“Both have failed to step up in light of the magnitude of the situation, and all of us are paying the price,” the education minister says. “I fully hope they will put their ego aside and we will reach agreements as soon as possible.”
The strike is officially to cover instructors teaching 10-12th grade, but some 9th-grade classes are also reported to be affected.
The Secondary School Teachers Association 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.
