Appointments at the Israel Electric Corporation are based on nepotism, with relatives getting preferential treatment versus outsiders, the comptroller found.
Advertisement
Nor does the IEC see anything wrong with discriminating in favor of the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and other relations, especially in the case of the nearest and dearest of high-placed company officers.
Back in 1974, in answer to a comptroller's query on biased hiring practices, the company commented: "If a candidate who is related to a worker has the required skills to fulfill the job, his candidacy should be given priority."
In the report of 1974, the comptroller noted that the preference was not legitimate, and recommended that the utility, which operates as a monopoly over electricity production in Israel, adopt proper hiring norms. Twenty-nine years have passed since the comptroller advised the company to abandon its nepotistic practices, which contravene the norms of proper administration. Yet the IEC has changed nothing whatsoever in its hiring practices, and has even justified them by what it dubs "organizational commitment."
In its answer to the comptroller's report of 2003, the company commented: "Granting priority to a worker's relative in hiring, assuming the candidate has identical skills to those of an external candidate, complies with the principle of organizational commitment in which the IEC believes."
The 2003 report reveals the astonishing dimensions of the "organizational commitment." In 1997, he wrote, 980 employees received tenure, of whom 200 worked in two manpower units that the comptroller investigated. His team found that 75 of the 200 had relatives working for the company.
In 2002, the comptroller found that of the 13,400 IEC workers, 986 had sons or daughters working at the company. Eleven workers had three offspring working at the IEC, 113 had two kids close by.
Altogether 1,121 IEC employees had parents working at the company in 2002. But the figure could be even higher, as that figure was collated from reports for entitlement to certain social benefits. If the kids were not granted eligibility, they were probably not marked as offspring of workers, the comptroller wrote.
In October 2002, the company employed 17 married couples in which the second spouse was accepted to the job after the company already employed the first spouse. That contravenes proper administration too. Irrespective of who was hired when, the company had 110 married couples and 40 of these had other relatives at the company.
The worst offenders were members of the workers' secretariat. It turned out that 65.5 percent of the secretariat's members had relatives working at the IEC in October 2002. Also, 44 percent of the human resources managers had kinfolk close by
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
