The Histadrut General Federation of Labor has remained quiet following the recent 13% pay hike granted to Israel's government ministers, MKs and senior civil servants. As with the rest of the public sector, the salaries of these senior figures have been frozen for the past three years. Now when the Histadrut chiefs sit around the table with the politicians in the new government to discuss salary hikes, they will have a 13% marker to refer to.
The Histadrut has not made any public announcement about its demands for the public sector but the benchmark will be the successful pay hike achieved by the teachers in the summer - 2.5% per year for the five years in which public sector pay has not risen. In other words Histadrut secretary general Arnon Ben-David will be demanding 13%.
Such a pay hike would cost the Ministry of Finance nearly NIS 8 billion. Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Amir Yaron has warned of the inflationary pressures of generous pay hikes.
The Ministry of Finance officials will come to the negotiating table with different ideas. They have seen public sector salaries creeping up in recent years despite the freezing of salary agreements in 2020. So in 2021 the average salary for civil servants was NIS 17,368, up 1.3% from 2020 and up 1.6% from 2019. Over the same period salaries in the private sector rose by more. Bar-David who agreed more than two years ago to postpone salary hikes for the public sector now expects to receive higher salaries for the period in which public sector employees waited. And any agreement reached will set the tone for salary agreements for other groups of workers.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 26, 2022.
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