"In Israel today, there are many people who do not wish to work, and prefer to receive unemployment benefit," Employment Service director-general Moshe Dimari said today. According to him, the right way to deal with those who refuse to work is to turn the job seeker from passive to active, and to oblige him to look for work in an active manner.
Under this proposal, unemployment benefit would from now on be made conditional on an active search for a job, not just through the employment bureaus, but also through newspaper classified advertisements and in other ways. Dimari estimated that, in this way, the number of job seekers could be reduced by 30-40%.
Commenting on the figures published yesterday by the Central Bureau of Statistics showing 210,000 unemployed, Dimari said that they were based on a workforce survey, not a headcount. He claims that there are currently only 160,000 unemployed people in Israel seeking work via the bureaus.
According to the Employment Service definition, an unemployed person is a job seeker looking for work through the Service’s employment bureaus. He or she does so in order to be referred to a job opportunity or professional training, or to exercise the right to receive unemployment benefit. The entitlement to unemployment benefit is for six months. The Employment Service statistics also include people who have exhausted their entitlement to unemployment benefit, but are entitled to income supplements from National Insurance because they have no other sources of livelihood or sustenance.
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics definition, an unemployed person is a person without a job who wants to work but cannot find employment. The number of unemployed is generally higher than the number of job seekers, as it includes people who are not entitled to unemployment benefit, and unemployed people who have completely despaired of finding work through the Employment Service, mostly women and young people without jobs.
Nevertheless, Dimari said the economy was indeed in a difficult situation, and that it was not easy to deal with the unemployment problem. "Unemployment keeps rising. For 60-70% of the unemployed, there are no solutions. I don’t want to give advice. We have plenty of experts in Israel who every morning pop up with new suggestions for solving the unemployment problem. But as long as the economy doesn’t grow, unemployment will continue to rise," Dimari said.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on July 28, 1998