Educators of the World, Unite

In 1973, the American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted the coming of a post-industrial society in which knowledge and information workers would play an increasingly important role. Like the United States, Israel has undergone a transition to post-industrialism. But if anyone thinks that labor conflicts are passé in the post-industrial era, they should take a look at recent events here. You wouldn't know it by reading the American press – the conflict with the Palestinians seems to be the only news about Israel that the U.S. media find fit to print – but in the past few months Israel has been convulsed by major labor conflicts involving its educational workers in both secondary and higher education.

Let's start with secondary schools. On December 13, 2007 – about a month before I arrived here – a 65-day strike by Israel's secondary school teachers concluded with an eleventh-hour agreement between the Secondary School Teachers Association and Israel's Education and Finance ministries, reached "just minutes before court injunctions ordering teachers back into the classroom would have gone into effect" ("The Morning After," The Jerusalem Report, Jan. 21, 2008). Following what The Jerusalem Post described as "the longest and most grueling education strike in Israeli history" ("The Treasury's Shining Hour?," Dec. 14, 2007), the agreement gave Israel's teachers a modest pay raise and a promise to reduce class size. However, the teachers' shamefully small salaries and poor working conditions were only the most prominent of a much wider set of grievances, which included growing frustration with repeated budget cuts imposed by Israel's Finance Ministry. As Israeli union activists put it, the teachers' struggle was not for themselves alone, but was a "just struggle for the future of public education in Israel" ("Schools Reopen as Last-Minute Talks Aim to Clinch Deal," The Jerusalem Post, December 13, 2007).

It's not clear to me whether the last-minute settlement with Israel's secondary school teachers adequately addresses the underlying problems and grievances. In an interesting commentary on the strike ("The Treasury's Shining Hour?," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 14, 2007), Haviv Rettig suggested that the outcome was a "tactical victory" for the Finance Ministry that reflected the current government's commitment to American-style market-oriented rationalization (in Max Weber's sense). "This is a Treasury," Rettig suggests, "that will enforce strict budgetary discipline and maintain an efficient marketplace at almost any cost." Quoting another observer of the education system, Rettig asked: "'Are we a country that has an economy or does the government think of us as an economy that happens to have a country?'" Rettig concluded that "the strike has only contributed to a widespread feeling – according to polls extremely widespread – that the country is led by a political class disconnected from the daily struggles of ordinary Israelis." (That situation should sound familiar to American readers.) But elsewhere Rettig offered a more optimistic assessment: "By forcing the government to recognize some of the structural issues in secondary education and to promise to deal with them," the teachers' union "may have succeeded in getting something very important…. [T]he current deal launched a process that will see a broader reform plan developed" ("Just the Beginning," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 14, 2007). Probably there is more conflict to come.

Secondary school teachers were not the only ones striking in Israel. Senior lecturers at Israeli universities brought their own extraordinary 90-day strike to an end on January 18, 2007 – just days after I arrived – when they, too, reached a deal with Israel's Treasury officials. The agreement, I might add, came only after the lecturers stood firm in the face of threats from the Council of University Presidents to seek an injunction against their strike or to cancel the academic year altogether. (The latter would have been completely unprecedented.) According to Haaretz, it was "the longest higher education strike in Israel's history."

As with the secondary school teachers, the university lecturers' demands for higher salaries (to compensate for years of wage erosion) were only the most prominent of a wider set of grievances. In an illuminating commentary ("Why Academics Are on Strike," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 27, 2007), Professor Nathan Dascal outlined the lecturers' other grievances, including cuts in government funding for research; increasing class size; the shrinking number of tenured academic positions; growing reliance on cheaper "junior academic staff (mostly our own PhD students) and non-tenured teachers hired for eight months a year and shamefully fired every summer without academic rights and unable to do any research"; and tuition hikes to compensate for the government's budget cuts. "Our struggle is really over funding for education and research," Professor Dascal noted, "not just our salaries." (As if Israel's university lecturers didn't have enough woes, some readers may recall that certain block-headed activists in Britain's University and College Union sought to punish them still more with an academic "boycott," more accurately described as a blacklist. Solidarity forever, but no Israelis need apply. That campaign was thankfully defeated when the union's own lawyers warned that such a blacklist would violate British anti-discrimination laws.) Again, it's not clear to me whether the compromise agreement between the university lecturers and the government will adequately address the underlying problems. Even leaving aside all of the other issues besides salaries, the deal reportedly fell short of the lecturers' initial demands. However, Zvi Hacohen, the head of the coordinating body for senior faculty organizations, nevertheless hailed it as "an excellent wage agreement, the best that has been reached in the last decade."

The broader social and historical context for these labor conflicts is the dismantling of Israel's once-sturdy social compact and the resulting growth in socio-economic inequality here. "During the last decade," The Forward noted in December 2004, "thanks to the Thatcherism of Likud and Labor neo-liberals [i.e., neo-liberals in the European sense of free-market enthusiasts], Israel has been turned from the most egalitarian nation in the industrialized world into the most unequal." In fact, the trend started earlier. In 2002, the Knesset Committee of Inquiry into Income Inequality found that "the gap between rich and poor [in Israel had] widened by 23 percent in the past two decades [i.e., since 1982], putting the country at the worst level of inequality in the Western world after the US. In contrast, Israel had one of the best equality figures in the 1960s" ("Gap Between Rich and Poor Here Up," The Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2002). Some readers may recall that shortly after Israel's 2006 election, there was talk that Israel's Labor Party (then under the new leadership of Amir Peretz), the religious Shas party, and the newly formed Pensioners' Party might form a united "social bloc" in the Knesset to halt the socio-economic polarization of Israeli society. Unfortunately, this much-needed social bloc never materialized, and the polarizing trend has continued. Just recently The Jerusalem Post reported the following: "The budget cuts of recent years and widening social gaps are causing increased polarization between those from rich and poor families according to Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, director of the National Council for the Child which released its 16th annual report…. Perhaps the most disturbing data revealed in the report is the confirmation that every third Israeli child lives below the poverty line" ("On Eve of Israel's 60th Anniversary Its Children Are Worse Off Than Ever," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 2007). Truly, the great theoreticians of socialist Zionism and the country's socialist founders must be turning over in their graves.

If all of this sounds critical of Israeli society, it's meant to be. However, we should remember that the social ills I have described in this post are hardly unique to Israel; they appear, albeit in different forms, in other countries as well. (American readers should need to be reminded of this least of all.) Moreover, my purpose here is not to add to the demonization of Israel ("Aha, warmongering and inegalitarian!"), which is regrettably all too common in certain circles that I have had the misfortune to encounter. On the contrary, my criticism reflects sincere distress about the serious harm these trends are doing to a country about which I care deeply; it reflects my concern that socio-economic inequality is weakening social solidarity here; and it reflects my own sense of solidarity with those "ordinary Israelis" from whose daily struggles the country's political class appears so disconnected. But, since I don't wish to end this post on a pessimistic note, I'll close with the words of the famous American radical and labor leader Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize." That advice is as good now as it was then.