From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Union head says teachers will strike to start school year
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Ran Erez, long-time chairman of the Teachers Union, says he is calling a strike for September 1, the first day of the 2024-2025 school year, after negotiations over teachers’ salaries and contracts failed to see results.
“On September 1, the teachers’ organization will not open the school year. We are on strike,” Erez says in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster.
Erez says that he is still open to negotiations with the Education Ministry and Finance Ministry, but stresses that the government must “bring us an offer that we can accept. There is currently no date for another meeting. They are stalling. The government does not want to pay and they want a strike.”
Erez does not offer details about the length of the planned strike. Salary negotiations leading to threats to delay the start of the school year — often actualized — are commonplace in Israel.
Last year, with mere hours to go before the start of the academic year, high school teachers and government officials reached a deal to bump up salaries, avoiding a threatened strike that would have delayed classes.
This year, the Teachers Union has been in ongoing but deadlocked negotiations with the Education and Finance ministries for months, with instructors demanding increased wages and a collective salary agreement, and the government pushing for individual salary contracts for teachers amid a budgetary shortfall.
The 2024 budget slashed millions of shekels in funding from the Education, Finance, National Security, Health and Welfare ministries to direct them toward displaced residents of the south and north amid the ongoing war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’ October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
