An agreement to settle the long-simmering wage dispute of Israel’s elementary school teachers, linking pay raises to those of Israel’s unionized engineers, was announced here today.
The agreement was in keeping with the proposals of the Horowitz Committee on the maintenance of the present pay ratios between the free professions, a spokesman for the Education Ministry said in reporting the agreement; The plan was proposed by Finance Minister Levi Eshkol on behalf of the Finance and Education Ministries with the support of secretary-general Aharon Becker of the Histadrut, Israel’s Labor Federation.
The Teachers Union had warned it would strike to win the increases; The agreement now reached was the result of a meeting of the Teachers Union with the Ministers of Finance and Education, Becker and Shalom Levin, secretary-general of the Teachers Union.
The wage increases, the amounts of which will be decided after negotiations are concluded with the Engineers Union, will be retroactive to September 1960, the Education Ministry spokesman said; He also said that the specific distribution of teachers’ wages in accordance with grade and seniority in comparison with the salaries of other free professionals was not considered at present; This phase of the agreement will be decided on in further negotiations.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
