Activists face bureaucrats: the failure of the Israeli social workers' campaign

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12029
• Date: 01 November 2013
• Author: Jonathan Preminger
• Published date: 01 November 2013

Activists face bureaucrats: the failure of

the Israeli social workers’ campaign

Jonathan Preminger

ABSTRACT

The Israeli social workers’ campaign of 2011 enjoyed widespread support, a ground-

swell of rank-and-file participation, and democratic representation through new

organisations pushing for a protracted struggle, yet the collective agreement seem-

ingly imposed by the Histadrut fell far short of expectations. This article explains this

discrepancy by asserting that the new organisations’ ‘radical’ organising approach

threatened the labour federation’s long history of social partnership and its main

strategies for retaining its hegemony. Thus incompatibility between the social part-

nership approach and the more radical ‘organising’ approach may explain the failure

of a collective campaign and shed light on cases where the union appears to be

suppressing or neutralising the aspirations of the workers it claims to represent.

1 INTRODUCTION

In 2011, Israeli social workers launched a major campaign as negotiations towards a

new collective agreement began. Members of the Social Workers Union (SWU) called

for extensive changes to the agreement, yet their aim was not just to ensure better

employment terms, but to influence welfare policies and end the privatisation of

welfare services. The campaign attracted wide support from the general public and at

least nominal support from many Knesset members, and there was an enormous

groundswell of energy leading to high rates of rank-and-file participation via protests,

strikes, debates and other channels such as Facebook. Moreover, new organisations

sprang up and channelled social workers’ activities and demands towards the union,

actively seeking representation through existing structures.

Thus, the campaign appeared to include all the elements required for successful

bargaining towards a far-reaching agreement. However, the final agreement disap-

pointed most of the social workers who had been involved. Yet anger was directed not

at the state (the main employer of most social workers and bargaining partner

vis-à-vis the workers’ representative organisations), but at the union. It was felt it had

let down the workers, had not acted in their interests; indeed, as I shall argue, the

union neutralised the workers’ voice and deflected democratic participation. The

❒Jonathan Preminger, is PhD Student in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Correspondence should be

addressed to Jonathan Preminger, Sociology Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva

8410501, Israel; email: yonatanpreminger@yahoo.co.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 44:5–6, 462–478

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

question I address, then, is, why did the social workers’ representative organisations

fail to achieve a satisfactory agreement when circumstances appeared to be so heavily

in favour?

I propose that the social workers’ representative organisations clung to what may,

in the Israeli context, be termed the ‘old left’, bureaucratic approach to the interclass

relations that underlay the Israeli neo-corporatist order, while the newly active social

workers and their ‘grassroots’ organisations adopted a more ‘radical left’ approach.

The two approaches reflect the ‘social partnership’ and ‘organising’ approaches dis-

cussed in the literature on union revitalisation (see Heery, 2002; Turner, 2005). The

adoption of one approach or the other is not merely a tactical choice, but reflects a

specific perspective on a union’s role vis-à-vis employers and state, and its relation

with its members. In the social workers’ campaign, the latter approach challenged the

former, threatening to undermine the status and strength of the hegemonic labour

federation (the Histadrut) and SWU. While some researchers have investigated how

unions may adopt either approach at various times, or in different sectors, or combine

the two approaches (see Badigannavar and Kelly, 2011; Heery, 2002; Turner, 2005),

I suggest that in some cases, the contradicting perspectives make the approaches

incompatible, leading one to undermine or neutralise the other. Thus, I assert, in the

Israeli social workers’ case, this incompatibility explains the Histadrut’s (and thus the

SWU’s) behaviour in acting against members’ aspirations, which led to an agreement

widely perceived among members as a failure.

In order to understand the role played by the Histadrut and SWU, one must

understand Israel’s singular labour history; therefore the following section will offer a

brief overview of the Histadrut’s historical mission and continuing dominance in Israeli

labour relations, the place of unions within it, plus moves to weaken organised labour

during the last 30 years. The third section presents an overview of the campaign: it

surveys the dynamics between the organisations involved and reveals the tension

between social workers’ activism and expectations on one hand and the authoritarian

leadership of the Histadrut on the other. It also notes the social workers’ continued

faith in the Histadrut as the most powerful representative organisation.

The subsequent discussion connects the two approaches to the ‘social partnership’

and ‘organising’ approach of union revitalisation literature. This analysis serves to

explain how the grassroots organisations, adopting the ‘organising’ approach, threat-

ened the Histadrut’s hegemony and status, which are rooted in a ‘social partnership’

approach. Finally, the article concludes by noting the contribution this research

makes to union revitalisation theories and suggesting some implications it may have

on union strategies and worker organising strategies in Israel.

This article is based on data from media reports during the campaign, documents

from websites of the organisations involved, conversations with activists, and formal

unstructured interviews with three campaign leaders: social worker Inbal Shlosberg,

chairperson of Atidenu from 2007 to 2012; Tal Goldman, one of two chairs of the

social work students’ organisation Osim Shinui; and Tami Farber, at the time leader

of breakaway social workers’ group Osot Hasharon who later ran in the SWU

elections (2013). Later interviews were held with Shay Niv, Globes correspondent for

labour issues, and Ilan Levine, then wages officer at the Finance Ministry. Methodo-

logically, I present a socio-political analysis of an historical case study. Such an

analysis enables a rich reconstruction of the chains of events while relating these

events to sociologically theorised categories of actors and their typical modes of

action and interaction.

463Activists face bureaucrats

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd