Workers are reuniting

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Kaplan Hospital, Castro, Vita, Coffee To Go, the Hebrew University's faculty of agriculture in Rehovot, Israir, the Israel Postal Authority - this is a partial list of places of work in which employees organized this year, established a union, and filed lawsuits. Sometimes with the help of the Histadrut labor federation, sometimes without it. The numbers are small - a few dozen workers in each place - but it seems to be a phenomenon. After many years, during which "workers' union" was a foreign expression at best and a curse at worst, a change seems to be taking place.

Until the mid-1980s, Israel ranked at one of the top places in the Western world in terms of the percentage of organized labor: Almost 80 percent of salaried workers belonged to a workers' union. This trend was changed by the economic program and the Economic Arrangements Law, the disintegration of the Histadrut, accelerated privatization and the growth of high-tech with workers hired according to individual contracts. Today, Israel ranks at one of the last places in the West: Only about 30 percent of its workers are organized. "Solidarity" sounds like an outdated expression from an old-fashioned world.

Recently things have been changing. Attorney Itai Svirsky of the legal clinic at Tel Aviv University said that about a year ago several social groups decided to emphasize the organization of workers as the most effective way of realizing their rights. "At first, if someone called and asked us to help him organize, we would say 'Wow,'" says Svirsky. "Now every week someone calls. It's routine."

Most of the requests come from young people who grew up in a world without workers' unions. Alon Lee Green, who established a union in a Tel Aviv branch of the Coffee Bean cafe chain is 19 years old; Kobi Karta, who established a union of security guards at the faculty of agriculture in Rehovot, began his activity after finishing his army service in the Golani Brigade. Green came to work in the cafe equipped with political awareness, as a member of the Communist Party. Karta says he was pushed into organizing workers simply because he was tired of being exploited and denied his rights. Quite easily, both of them succeeded in convincing their colleagues at work that the best way to make progress was through organization and solidarity.

These organizational activities arose out of a vacuum left by the Histadrut. In principle, of course, that organization has always supported organizing, but for years it was passive and looked on from the sidelines as the number of contractual workers and temporary employees gradually increased. Recently, there have been signs of change. In Coffee Bean's case, the Histadrut was involved in the struggle from the outset; with Israir, it helped organize the cabin attendants.

That is not enough, say critics of the Histadrut, pointing to the fact that its chair, Ofer Eini, recently agreed to extend the period required for a manpower agency employee to become a permanent worker, from nine to 18 months. But even if it is only paying lip service, it is clear that the Histadrut is progressing - that it senses that the spirit of the times has changed.

Svirsky admits that most of the organizing is done by workers who come from a relatively "strong" background: security guards who are mostly university students, waiters who are aware of their rights. "You need basic elements of power in order to act," he notes. "It still hasn't reached the very weak population."

In fact, the massive enlistment of tens of thousands of teachers during the most recent strike, and the surprising radicalism they demonstrated, seem to be a part of the same process. The "middle class" of employees is beginning to move. That is no small change.