No end in sight for high school teachers’ strike after talks end with no progress
Expecting ongoing stoppage, Education Ministry confirms intent to open ‘alternative frameworks’ next week to provide non-academic activities for students
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Negotiations between the Secondary Schools Teachers Association and the ministries of education and finance ended without progress Tuesday, with union head Ran Erez saying educators would continue to strike.
In an announcement Tuesday after the meeting, Erez said, “Today’s negotiations ended again without progress. The strike in high schools will continue tomorrow, Wednesday, September 4,” extending the open-ended strike by another day.
In a video message sent out Tuesday afternoon, Education Minister Yoav Kisch said that “the strike must end” because it was “causing harm to Israeli society.” Kisch accused Erez of going back on previously discussed positions in the negotiations and called on him to come to an agreement.
“We don’t have the privilege during wartime of exhausting the public,” Kisch continued, noting that he has received complaints that teenagers, especially in evacuated northern communities, were “climbing the walls” without the stability of being in school.
He continued: “We are already taking action so that this Sunday, we will open alternative frameworks for the youth… we will find the budget,” confirming reports in the Hebrew media that the Education Ministry was seeking to open non-academic programming next week.
However, a source in the Education Ministry told The Times of Israel that “no one wants this solution, because it means the strike will continue.”
“We can’t open school and bring in other teachers, so maybe there will be other activities… we are exploring a lot of options,” the source said, stressing that “nothing is decided or approved.”
The ministry expects that the strike, which began on Sunday, could continue for some time, the official said.
In an earlier Tuesday statement, Kisch said the negotiations revolve around “nonsense” while “evacuated students find themselves without structure, at-risk youth wander the streets and teachers are missing their income.”
The strike officially covers instructors teaching 10-12th grade, but some 9th-grade classes are also reported to be affected. It is a separate action from the one-day general strike called by the Histadrut labor federation on Monday, which caused elementary and middle schools to close early and kindergartens to be closed completely.
There are some 514,000 high-school students in Israel this year, according to Education Ministry data.
The Secondary School Teachers Association has for weeks been engaged in ongoing yet deadlocked negotiations with the education and finance ministries leading up to the strike, which was officially announced last Thursday.
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 make 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 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.
The 2024 budget slashed millions of shekels in funding from government ministries, including the Education Ministry, instead directing them toward displaced residents of the south and north amid the ongoing war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Teachers’ strikes at the start of the school year have over the last few years become commonplace in Israel.
Last year, with mere hours to go before the start of the 2023-2024 academic year, high school teachers and government officials reached a deal to bump up salaries, avoiding a threatened strike that would have delayed classes, but that deal wasn’t implemented after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
That marked the second year in a row that a strike had been averted at the last moment, after a separate teachers union that represents elementary and middle school teachers nearly delayed the start of the 2022-2023 school year before the Treasury agreed to raise their salaries.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
