Ofer Eini and the Histadrut are deaf to the voices of change calling from Cairo and the Arab world. Unions around the world identify with the new forces, leaving the conservative Histadrut alone in its corner. Hussein Mugawer was recently…
Article Author: Adiv, Assaf
The Social Workers’ Strike: A Setback with Important Lessons
The social workers’ strike ended in disappointment. (See Background article.) After the momentum gathered by thousands of social workers who took to the streets for 23 days, there is the feeling of a squandered opportunity. The agreement forced upon them by…
Social workers’ strike: confronting a privatized state
Sunday March 20 marked an important event in the history of trade unionism in Israel. The leadership assembly of the Social Workers’ Union (SWU), which organizes some 10,000 public sector social workers, rejected the Histadrut’s offer to sign a collective…
Politics at the Workers’ Expense
Histadrut Chairman Ofer Eini is trying to deceive us all. On Nov. 2 he signed a two-year wage agreement and canceled a general strike, thus supporting the Netanyahu-Barak coalition in a very tangible way. The following day he came out…
Erdogan and Israel: Glitch or Rupture?
The crisis in the relationship between Israel and Turkey reached a head following the IDF raid on the flotilla to Gaza at the end of last May, during which nine IHH activists were killed. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan…
The Arab Sector: Israel’s Springboard into the OECD?
Assaf Adiv is the National Director of the Workers Advice Center (WAC-MAAN). A briefer version of this article was published in The Marker on April 15, 2010. Every few months politicians and economists beat their breasts over the fact that Israel’s 1.5…
War on Scarecrows: Steinitz at the Treasury
Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s Minister of Finance, takes no rest. We have not yet recovered from his blatant attack on the High Court of Justice (he claims that its “populist” decisions waste public money) and already we hear that he’s gearing…
War in Gaza: The Real Test for Meretz and the Israeli Left
After the first and second Intifadas, and the first and second Lebanon wars, one would expect the Israeli left to come out unequivocally against the war on Gaza and denounce Israel’s brutal use of military force to dictate political processes.…
The Winograd Report: Trumpeting the Next War
ON JANUARY 30, 2008, the Winograd Committee submitted its final report on the performance of Israel’s political and military echelons during the second Lebanon War (August 2006). In an earlier interim account, it had severely criticized Prime Minister Ehud Olmert…
The Teachers’ Strike
From the Grass Roots Up A TWO-MONTH strike of Israeli high school teachers, their longest ever, ended in December 2007 when the independent High School Teachers Organization (HSTO) reached a compromise with the government. The strike went beyond a labor…