Teachers to strike Sunday morning in protest of surprise cuts to salaries

The Israel Teachers Union announced on Friday it would strike on Sunday by only starting classes at 11 a.m., a measure taken to protest the surprise 3.3 percent drop in government salaries for April amid the war in Gaza.

According to the union, the strike will take place in preschools, elementary schools and middle schools, but special education institutions will not be affected.

Union chief Yaffa Ben David said in a statement that teachers were not included in a Finance Ministry initiative to provide compensation for government employees whose salaries were lowered.

“The Finance Ministry is acting arrogantly and with moral blindness toward [teachers],” Ben David said in her statement. “[The ministry] is choosing to run from responsibility, violate commitments and operate with infuriating insensitivity. This is not only a serious harm to educators but to the entire education system, which is in a very serious crisis.”

The Teachers Union accused the ministry of not negotiating sufficiently over the issue, as ordered by a regional labor court, going so far as to purposely stay away from a joint meeting with Education Minister Yoav Kisch.

“The [teachers’] struggle is completely justified!” Kisch tweeted. “The Finance Ministry bureaucrats are confused. It cannot be that [the teachers], who do sacred work, will be discriminated against in relation to all other workers in the Israeli workforce.”

Yaffa Ben David, the secretary-general of the Israel Teachers Union, arrives for negotiations at the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem, August 31, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The Education Ministry is not opposed to the strike and will not request an injunction against it in labor courts, Kisch said.

The strike began on Friday in an unofficial manner, with hundreds of kindergarten teachers calling in sick, leading preschools around the country to not open, as not enough substitutes could be found.

The areas affected included Jerusalem, Ramat Gan, Rehovot, Kfar Saba, Netanya, Shoham, Yavne, Hod Hasharon and Kiryat Ono. In the latter city, some elementary school teachers also took a sick day.

The teachers undertook the action to circumvent an injunction issued by a regional labor court against a strike planned by the Teachers Union for Friday.

The ministries of finance and education were aware that teachers would call in sick, Haaretz reported. The Finance Ministry requested that the Education Ministry not recognize the absences as sick days and that the teachers’ salaries be docked accordingly.

Unlike the strike planned for Sunday, the Education Ministry opposed the unofficial measure, saying in a statement: “There is no room for slowdowns in the education system. If a kindergarten teacher doesn’t report to work for this reason, the absence will be considered unjustified, with all that that implies.”