Cabinet Crisis over Teachers Pay Averted but Issue is Unresolved

— A Cabinet crisis over improved pay for teachers was averted today, but the issue still remains unresolved. The Cabinet decided that Finance Minister Yigal Hurwitz and Education Minister Zevulun Hammer, who are sharply at adds over the issue, will join Premier Menachem Begin in a committee to discuss it “with a view to reaching an agreed decision.”

Cabinet sources said it was hoped that a special Cabinet meeting could be held at the end of the week to resolve the dispute over the report by the Etzioni Commission which recommends dramatic improvements in wages and conditions for teachers. Hurwitz reiterated today that he will resign immediately if the Cabinet endorses the recommendations, even if they are not to be implemented until 1982.

Hammer, while abstaining from outright threats, is understood to be just as firmly entrenched in his position that the recommendations of the government commission must be endorsed by the Cabinet in principle, with a specific and clear undertaking that the wage rises will be carried through –even though in stages and over a period of years.

Cabinet sources said opinion during today’s session seemed to tilt in favor of Hurwitz. Had there been a vote, these sources assessed, the Finance Minister would have won a majority. But Hammer made a point of noting after the session that Begin himself seemed to support the Education Ministry’s view.

The two teachers unions reacted angrily to the Cabinet’s decision not to decide yet. The secondary school teachers said they would formally declare a “labor dispute” immediately. This is a legal step that entitles a union to take strike action 15 days laters. The elementary school union leaders also said they would not accept “this foot-dragging” and hinted that some form of labor sanctions would already be felt in the classrooms during this week.

ESSENCE OF ETZIONI REPORT

Likud ministers and leading Knesset members were working feverishly before, during and after the Cabinet meeting to devise a formula that could enable both Hammer and Hurwitz to stay in office. The basic motif in all these efforts is an endorsement-in-principle of the Etzioni report coupled with a loophole enabling the government to defer payment of the wage hikes for the time being.

The Etzioni report recommended a year ago that teachers should receive an increase of about 55 percent on present salaries which average about $525 a month. Together with a demand for retirement at 50 and a requested 20 percent increase in the teaching staff the hike would cost the treasury about $1.5 billion.

The teachers union is demanding parity with engineering workers who they say earn about 60 percent more. The basic starting salary for a newly-qualified teacher is $328 a month and goes up to $618 a month after 26 years. A teacher with a master’s degree earns $421 a month during the first year, rising to a ceiling of $723 a month.

Political observers say the matter is complicated, and Hammer’s position weakened, by the Burg-Shafir affair and by the Abu-Hatzeira affair, which both involve ministers from Hammer’s National Religious Party. These two affairs, it is reasoned, must inevitably make Hammer think twice and thrice before moving to bring down the government and thereby advance the elections.

From the NRP’s point of view, these observers feel, the later the elections are held — the better. By next November (the statutory date), the NRP hopes, the Burg-Shafir affair will have been long forgotten and Abu-Hatzeira will have been able to prove his innocence in court, or alternatively, if he is found guilty, his conviction will have lost its immediate impact on the minds of the electorate.