A monthly salary of NIS 30,000 is no guarantee against feeling badly done to. 66 tenured employees of Israel Ports Development & Assets Company Ltd., considered the government company with the highest salaries, have petitioned the court to order the government to pay them the special bonus paid to company employees with personal contracts. The state argues that this was compensation paid to employees who were not eligible for the bonus received by the tenured employees.
The claim by Ports Company's tenured employees in their petition to the Tel Aviv District Labor Court, through the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor in Israel), is partly based on statements by Ports Company CEO Shlomo Brieman to Government Companies Authority vice chairman Nava Kramer, who is responsible for salaries at government companies. The statements allegedly support the claim that management did not consider the payment as a reform grant, but requested to distribute a special bonus for the company's performance. The state argues that Brieman mistakenly used the word "bonus" instead of "grant".
The Ports Company pays its 120 employees salaries that other wage-earners in Israel can only dream about. For example, in 2011, the average gross monthly salary at the Ports Company was NIS 29,250, according to the Ministry of Finance's director of wages. Their average salary was almost quadruple the average national salary of NIS 8,558 in 2011, and NIS 3,000 higher than the average salary at the much besmirched Ashdod Port Company Ltd. The Ports Company has 70 tenured employees under a collective agreement and 40 employees with personal contracts.
In late 2011, 34 Ports Company employees with personal contracts received NIS 1.5 million in bonuses from the government - an average bonus of NIS 43,000 per employee. The government said that the bonuses were given to these employees as compensation because they were ineligible for the second half of the "reform bonus" promised the company's tenured employees for their consent to the ports reform in 2004. The second half of the bonus of NIS 50,000 per employee was only paid to the Port Company's 66 tenured employees in August 2010.
The employees with personal contracts petitioned the director of wages to receive the bonus as well, and then-Director of Wages Ilan Levin, agreed. But the tenured employees, who felt discriminated against, claimed that they were also eligible for the bonus paid to the employees with personal contracts, regardless of the fact that they had already received the full reform bonus from the government.
The tenured employees got the chance to establish their claim when Brieman sent the letter about the "bonus", instead of "grant", to the employees with personal contracts for 2009-10. The use of the word "bonus", the non-use of the word "reform grant", and the statement that the Ports Company does not distribute dividends, with the result that its employees lose their eligibility for bonuses, give the impression that Brieman asked for a separate benefit, which was unrelated to the reform bonus.
In its statement of defense, the state says that Brieman's use of the word "bonus" was a mistake, and that the Ports Company never intended to distribute bonuses to its employees.
The Ports Company said that the Histadrut appealed to the labor court over the tenured employees' claim for a bonus. A synopsis of Government Companies Authority and the Ports Company's position filed in the court states that the tenured employees and the Histadrut have no grounds for the claim, and do not have the right to sue in any case.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 18, 2013
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