Labor Dispute Erupts at Israel's Ports

Eric Lee

Eric Lee is an American-born writer and website developer, who lived for a number of years at Kibbutz Ein Dor, before moving to Britain. He is the founding editor of LabourStart, an online news service for the international trade union movement and works with the TULIP [Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine] website. In the 1990s, Lee created and ran the website, BibiWatch, dedicated to monitoring Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term of office in the late 1990s.

The following are news stories that have appeared on the TULIP site recently, brought to our attention by Eric Lee:

Netanyahu’s Minister of the Economy ramps up the rhetoric – jokes about ‘exterminating’ port workers

It started with a secret plan to bring in troops to break a potential port strike. That was followed by threats to move work to ports in neighboring countries. But now Netanyahu’s far-right Minister of the Economy, Naftali Bennett, has gone one step further — he’s joked publicly, on Facebook, about ‘exterminating’ port workers.

Read more here: http://www.tuliponline.org/?p=4319

Transportation Minister: We’ll use ports in Jordan, Greece, Cyprus or Turkey to break union

Following up on reports earlier this week that the Israeli government was considering using Israel Defense Forces troops to break a potential port workers strike, the Transportation Minister Israel Katz now says that there are other options as well.

Read more here: http://www.tuliponline.org/?p=4316

Israel: Ports battle shaping up as gov’t threatens ‘war’ on workers, threatens to deploy army as strike-breakers

The language of Israel’s new finance minister Yair Lapid couldn’t be clearer: “Let there be war.” Lapid was referring to the impending battle over privatisation of Israel’s state owned ports. Unions are defending the port workers and especially their right to bargain collectively and to strike in the face of an unprecedented attack by the Netanyahu government. Ha’aretz is claiming the government will deploy IDF soldiers as strike-breakers if necessary to keep the ports open.

Read more here: http://www.tuliponline.org/?p=4314

Finally, you may be interested to read my own [Eric Lee’s] article on the ports dispute which appeared on the blog of the British Trades Union Congress, Stronger Unions —Israel’s Ports Haunted by Ronald Reagan’s Ghost.

You’re invited to peruse the website of TULIP. If you agree that more people need to know about the issues TULIP addresses, including labor issues in Israel and Palestine, please do the following:

Tell your friends, family, co-workers and fellow labor union members about TULIP.
Encourage people to join TULIP’s mailing list.
Visit the TULIP website regularly.
Make sure to like TULIP on Facebook — and share and like our daily posts.
Follow us on Twitter — make sure to re-tweet our stories.