The ongoing university lecturers strike continues after talks broke down Saturday night. Back-to-work orders may be issued Sunday or the semester cancelled.
A last-minute four-hour meeting between members of the senior academic staff and university presidents broke down Saturday night shortly after midnight. The two sides will meet again Sunday at the National Labor Court, where Judge Steve Adler will decide whether or not to order the lecturers to return to work. Many lecturers have said that if they are ordered back to work, they will return to the classroom, but will not teach.
University heads said they had offered the senior lecturers a 21 percent raise over this year and next, another five percent raise beginning in 2010, and from then on a 1.5 percent raise each year to counteract the effects of inflation. The offer is the best they can give, they said. Lecturers said the university presidents had backtracked on deals they had offered in earlier negotiations, setting “a dangerous precedent.” The offer would decrease the erosion in lecturers’ salaries but not solve the problem completely, they said.
Officials in the Treasury said Sunday that in any event they could not accept the offer made by university presidents. The proposal “is not acceptable to the government,” one official explained.
The heads of the universities posit that if they manage to hammer out an agreement with the lecturers, they can approach Prime Minister Ehud Olmert directly and ask him to intervene, forcing the Finance Ministry to accept the deal.
If the lecturers’ strike does not end on Sunday, university presidents have said they would be forced to cancel the semester, causing serious damage to Israel’s economy.
Olmert to Lecturers: Go Back to School!
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert opened the weekly Sunday morning cabinet meeting with a statement urging striking professors and senior lecturers to return to university classrooms. Olmert said he made the statement "at the last minute so [the lecturers] will not be forced by court order to return to work."
Dozens of students at a protest at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv called on the prime minister to personally intervene in the strike which began at the beginning of the semester. Professors are deadlocked with the Finance Ministry over deterioration in the value of their wages.
The National Labor Court was scheduled to decide whether to grant the universities an injunction forcing the striking lecturers to return to the campus, but no decision had been announced as of 2:00 PM.