[etni] [FWD: excerpt from article: Ha'aretz.com]

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 -------- Original Message --------
 Subject: excerpt from article: Ha'aretz.com
 From: "cindy komet" <cindy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
 
Ha'aretz.com
Bank, budget and blackboard How will Stanley Fischer, the Likud 
rebels and the Dovrat committee effect Israel's future?
Fri., January 14, 2005 Shvat 4, 5765
Bank, budget and blackboard By Nehemia Strasler
 
3. Teachers' salaries. The Dovrat report proposes good salary 
raises for the teachers. The tables were prepared by the 
subcommittee headed by Meir Shani. They are based on the 
assumption that all the proposals in the report will be implemented 
- as though we were talking about Switzerland rather than Israel. 
As though it is common in Israel for the conclusions of a 
committee to be carried out to the letter.
 
In order to make it possible to raise the teachers' salaries, the 
authors of the Dovrat report gathered money from several sources. 
The first source is the Finance Ministry, from which they will 
receive an additional budget of NIS 1.2 billion annually. A second 
source is a streamlining process in the Ministry of Education: the 
closing of colleges and teachers' seminaries, the abolishment of 
regional offices, the dismissal of supervisors and workers - a 
process that will net NIS 1.5 billion. In addition, the report 
assumes the dismissal and retirement of about 14,000 teachers, 
and for all the others, more hours of frontal teaching. In addition, 
the local authorities (which are barely surviving) must contribute 
their share.

First of all, there is no chance that all of this will happen. But if 
a miracle occurs, and everyone implements the plan to the letter, 
even then the treasury will not agree to the new salary tables - 
because, it claims, they are too high. They have dangerous and 
broad implications, since nobody in the government sector will 
agree to maintain his present salary at a time when the 
teachers are bypassing him by such a large differential.

We have already gone down this road, in 1993-94, when the 
government of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin announced "a 
change in the order of priorities - less to the territories, more 
to education and infrastructure." The idea was to have money 
for teachers and for roads, but the entire government sector 
rebelled - and also received considerable sums. Thus the budget 
was breached, and the economy found itself in difficulties. 
Netanyahu doesn't want to undergo that trauma.
 
Kobi Haber, the treasury budget director, says that he is willing 
to raise teachers' salaries, but only in accordance with the 
implementation of streamlining and dismissals. So the battle 
over wages is just beginning.



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