In Israel, this week two very basic services to the public are in danger of being seriously interrupted. The primary school and kindergarten teachers, who have been negotiating with the Finance Ministry for months, are threatening to strike on September first and not opening the new school year. The organization of high school teachers has joined the ride and has come up with its own demands or the will strike too. At the same time, the health system is desperately struggling with the mass-resignations of the interns at hospitals around the country with a two hundred of them handing in letters of resignation this week and promises to continue the resignations on a weekly basis until their demands are met.
So what are these conflicts really all about?
In the health system, in particular in the hospitals, interns have been made to do night duty 5-7 times a month, which means coming in for work in the morning at 7 or 8, and going home the next morning at 9 or 10, after a 26-hour shift, likely without any sleep at all, and patients to care for. The resentment against this has grown significantly in the past couple of years, and the arguments brought up by the interns, that after 26 hours it is almost impossible to be able to perform their task, which after all, is taking care of our health. And who would not be worried if he is ill and being treated by a doctor who has been on his (or her) feet for more than 20 hours? The demands to limit such shifts to 18 hours seems reasonable and justified and long overdue. However, such dramatic changes will have significant consequences, and (of course) will require significant budgetary additions for the hospitals. If interns will start to work 30% less hours on their night shifts, in order to compensate for this, hundreds of extra doctors will be needed to fill the gaps. Doctors who simply aren’t available and even if significant changes are made to the study of medicine in Israel, with more people being accepted, the gap will not be filled completely for 5-6 years, even if retired physicians are being called upon to return to their jobs, at least partially. The cost of such reforms will be tremendous and Finance Ministry people have long argued that it can only be done very gradually. To aggravate this even more, the interns, whose salary is in many cases for 50% dependent on the night shifts and their long hours (a typical intern may work 300 hours a month) are at this point not willing to accept reductions in their income as a result of shorter night shift hours. Last autumn, during a previous episode in which interns started to resign, negotiations resulted in an agreement that would allow implementation of shorter night shift hours in hospitals outside the country’s center, starting in April 2022. April has come and gone but nothing happened. The money that was promised by the Finance Ministry was never allocated and the interns lost their patience and returned to the only weapon they believe is effective: resignations. While the Finance Ministry claims that the agreement still stands, but cannot be implemented by a government that has officially resigned, the interns only see this as a delay tactic that will postpone the full implementation even more (since the implementation of the program will take several years in the optimistic scenario, many of those currently doing internships will have completed it before the program is implemented in their hospital in any case).
The education system has been looking at strikes or threats of strikes at the beginning of the school year for almost every year. But this time it appears to be different and Israeli children may enjoy (!) an addition to their summer vacation. The teachers union has put forward very strong demands for improvement of the salaries of teachers, and are backed up by OECD research data the show that a beginning teacher in Israel earns the pitiful sum of $ 1,700 a month. This together with often difficult working conditions, has made many young teachers leave the profession after a short time and many others not even entering the system, which has resulted currently in a lack of no less than six thousand teachers in the school system, making working conditions for those that are still in the system even worse. The finance ministry, on the other hand, realizing that the salary demands are not at all unreasonable, has come up with counter demands involving, excellence, vacation days and durability. While important issues, it appears the Finance Ministry is simply attempting to find counter arguments that may be thrown out in return for concessions from the teachers. In any case, the proposals by the Finance Ministry, which include a significant salary raise for beginning teachers, (to about $ 2,700), has been rejected by the teachers union and negotiations have made no progress for weeks. Add to this the quite abrasive character of the teacher’s union’s leader, who also appears to enjoy the attention from TV and press, the haughtiness of the Finance minister and the (until now) relative apathy of the Prime Minister, and the prospects for a solution are not good.
As with most public disputes in Israel, in particular strikes and work-stoppages, it is difficult for an innocent bystander to distil the truth out of the often completely contradictory statements by the parties, but that only exacerbates the danger for the public who stands to become a victim of these conflicts, be it a sick person who will not get the care he needs because half the interns at the department where he is hospitalized have resigned, or the parent who cannot go to work because his children can’t go to school.
In both disputes, basic public services are at stake, and while the demands being brought forward by both the interns and the teachers appear to be justified, it may be expected from organizations representing these workers, and maybe even more so from the government that is responsible for these public services, that they both show a minimum of responsibility and not allow a situation to develop whereby a patient will die because the doctor resigned, or a child cannot get the education it deserves, because his or her teacher is on strike.
Too much to ask for?
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