Last update - 01:43 07/01/2008
Adler proposes arbitration on lecturers' salaries
By Tamara Traubmann
In a last-ditch attempt to get negotiations back to a realistic footing before deliberations begin on the university heads' request for injunctions against the striking lecturers, National Labor Court President Stephen Adler made a new proposal for arbitration between the treasury and representatives of the lecturers. The proposed arbitration would determine the extent to which the lecturers' salaries have been eroded since 1997. The new offer promises a variable-percentage salary hike, regardless of the arbitration results. Last night's session was still in progress at press time.
Over the past weeks, the court has held sessions nearly every day in an attempt to end the strike, which began 79 days ago, but no significant progress has been made in the negotiations. In response to university administrators' threats to cancel the semester, Prof. Asher Cohen, who represents the striking teachers in the negotiations, said the lecturers are "prepared to strike for the spring semester, too, and to continue until an agreement is reached."
The court will consider on Wednesday the university presidents' request for injunctions that would prohibit an extension of the strike past next Sunday, which they say is the final deadline beyond which it will be too late to save the semester. The start of the deliberations on the injunctions is expected to provoke further action by the lecturers, who in the past two weeks have passed no-confidence and condemnatory motions against their own university presidents for having turned to the courts.
Today, however, the university presidents showed a certain ambivalence about their court request, in light of the hardening of the treasury's position. In a session of the Knesset Education Committee yesterday, Hebrew University of Jerusalem president Prof. Menachem Magidor said that he and his colleagues will not necessarily insist on having their demand met. "It depends on how the parties behave," he said.
Representatives of the striking senior lecturers and Magidor accused treasury officials of "foot-dragging." Last Wednesday night treasury officials were asked to examine proposals for a mechanism to prevent faculty salary erosion in the future - one of the two core issues of the labor dispute - and submit a response by Thursday, but by yesterday afternoon they had still failed to do so.
Knesset Education Committee chair MK Rabbi Michael Melchior (Labor-Meimad) even asked the treasury's deputy wages director, Yossi Cohen, whether this was an intentional measure aimed at postponing the negotiations until Sunday in order to break the strike using court injunctions and destroy the strikers' bargaining position.
"It would be irresponsible to submit to the lecturers' demands," Cohen said in response. "The implications could be very serious for the totality of labor agreements. One must consider that the Histadrut labor federation is delaying the signing of wage agreements until a contract is signed with the lecturers."
Cohen claimed that the strikers' demands have ballooned since the strike began, "reaching 35 percent for wage erosion, while we claim erosion of only 3 percent. We offered them proposals they never imagined they would get," Cohen said, referring to the offer to change the way that lecturers' wages are calculated to produce an automatic wage hike.