Ran Erez, the long-time chairman of the Secondary School Teachers Association, declared Wednesday that high school teachers will go on strike on September 1, the first day of the 2024-2025 school year, after negotiations on salaries and contracts failed to produce an agreement.
“On September 1, the teachers organization will not open the school year. We are on strike,” Erez said in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster.
The announcement came as the union has been engaged in ongoing yet deadlocked negotiations with the education and finance ministries, with instructors demanding retroactive wage increases and other benefits that were agreed upon before the last school year began, but were later deferred due to Hamas’s October 7 attack and outbreak of war.
The union is also seeking a collective salary agreement, a major sticking point in the negotiations, while the government has pushed for individual contracts for teachers amid a budgetary shortfall.
Erez said that he is still open to negotiations with the Education Ministry and Finance Ministry, but that the government must “bring us an offer that we can accept. There is currently no date for another meeting. They are stalling. The government does not want to pay and they want a strike.”
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The union boss did not offer details about the potential length of the planned strike. Salary negotiations that include threats to delay the start of the school year — often actualized — are commonplace in Israel.
The high school teachers union represents educators working with students in grades 7-12. According to statistics provided by the Education Ministry, some 514,000 students are registered at high schools for the upcoming school year and 335,000 at middle schools.
An empty classroom at a school in Tel Aviv, during a strike of the National Student and Youth Council, on September 12, 2023. (Flash90)
In a Tuesday press release ahead of the strike declaration, the Secondary School Teachers Association said the Education Ministry and the Finance Ministry were unwilling to bend on their insistence on individual contracts for teachers, which the union said will lead to lower wages, increased teacher turnover and reduced quality of education.
The “sole responsibility” for a strike rests with Education Minister Yoav Kisch, the release charged, saying his negotiating positions were presented as a “media spin, without any intent to compromise.”
In the interview with Kan, Erez hit out at Kisch, saying he had been “incorrectly” made education minister because he “was not offered another position” during the coalition talks in late 2022 to form the current government.
Kisch, a member of the ruling Likud party who is a former air force and El Al pilot, did not have a background in education before becoming education minister.
“I feel sorry for him,” Erez said, adding that Kisch was dealing with “many problems but nothing happens… he is a puppet, a marionette of the Finance Ministry.”
In a letter sent Wednesday to teachers, Kisch outlined some of the government’s proposals to avert a strike, and blamed the “unnecessary insistence by Ran Erez and the alleged teachers union regarding personal contracts” for derailing negotiations.
Individual contracts are “an accepted practice that maintains stability and fairness” in the workplace and are part of salary agreements at many government offices, Kisch argued.
“My personal feeling is that it would not have mattered even if the subject of the ‘personal contracts’ had been dropped from the agenda,” Kisch wrote. “Throughout the negotiations… varied proposals were made, and each time some progress was made on one issue or another, at the following meeting the Teachers Union went back [to their original stance.]”
“Regardless of what we could offer, in my estimation, Ran Erez and the Teachers Union he leads would have chosen to go on strike anyway,” the minister continued.
He urged Erez to call off the strike, which will “harm the entire education system… and bring severe consequences for students and parents.”
Illustrative:An empty school at in Tel Aviv following a strike of the Teachers Union, on June 19, 2022. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
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.
The Education Ministry faced a cut of NIS 38,283,000 ($10.3 million) in July.
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.
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.
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