A one-day strike today by 30,000 teachers in Israel may very well be an historic one. The action was not against any employer but against a computer–a malfunctioning computer, that is. For the last 16 months, teachers have been claiming that their wage slips are either incorrect or missing altogether. The result has been that either wages were incorrect or no wages at all.
The irate teachers were forced to go to the Education Ministry offices, calculate the errors, get advance payments and wait on lines. The malfunctioning computer at the Ministry caused total chaos in the wage payment system. A decision was made to buy a new machine, but the computer’s operators and auxiliary workers warned that the new gadget was inappropriate for the job. Nevertheless, the machine was installed. The operators staged a walk-out and the chaos started all over again. The blame for the chaos and the woes of the teachers were shifted from the computer to the operators and back to the computer. At long last, the teachers decided to stage a one-day “warning strike.”
The walk-out today left some 500,000 pupils without teachers. The only classes that continued to have sessions were kindergartens, schools for handicapped children and schools in border areas. Elad Peled, Education Ministry director-general, termed the strike unnecessary but conceded there had been 6000 errors last month and 11,000 errors in December.
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.
