Local authorities today are experiencing a personnel crisis the likes of which we haven’t known before”, says Hagit Magen, Head of the Wage and Labor Agreements Administration at the Center for Local Government. “We’re having trouble recruiting employees for management and senior positions, too, and no less troubling, we’re losing quality personnel who are leaving us because we don’t have the means to retain them.”
Magen, along with Sandra Cohen, Head of Human Resources for the Lod Municipal Authority and chairwoman of the Association of Human Resources Managers of Municipal Authorities, and Gil Bar-Tal, chairman of the Union of Clerical and Public Service Employees (UCAPSE), spoke with Davar to describe the actual results of wage erosion in the public sector, and the urgent need for change.
“We’re short on engineers, practical engineers, social workers, attorneys, psychologists, inspectors, human resources personnel, and of course kindergarten assistant teachers,” says Cohen. “The number of résumés we receive for each position is very low to nil. This wasn’t the case four or five years ago.”
Cohen and Bar-Tal’s concern for the future of public service and sense of urgency can be heard in their voices. They are waiting for the next collective bargaining agreement for public sector employees, which they say has to include a significant wage increase and make working conditions in municipal government more attractive.
“The average wage at municipal government offices is not attractive enough when compared to the private sector”
The 2020 report by the Wage Commissioner in the Ministry of Finance, published last week, reveals that the average wage of the nearly 200,000 employees of local governments in Israel is 10,700 shekels ($3,200) per month. This is much lower than the average wage of all public sector employees, which comes out to 17,400 shekels ($5,200) per month, as well as the average wage among all sectors of the economy, which was 11,500 shekels ($3,500) per month. “At these levels, it’s very difficult to bring in personnel”, says Magen, “let alone quality personnel.”
“In Lod I’ve been looking for a Garbage Disposal Department manager for over a year now”, says Cohen. “I’ve publicized the position six times already, and people aren’t applying. The gross monthly salary is 17,000 – 18,000 shekels ($5,000 – $5,400) for six workdays a week, with every workday starting at 05:00 AM. And that one’s actually a good case, because it’s what’s referred to in local government as ‘senior wage.’ Most of our employees receive minimum wage. By that I mean custodians, kindergarten assistant teachers, garbage disposal workers. I have employees who have been working for 20 years who are still earning minimum wage.”
Magen and Cohen say that in the past, working in local government was the height of ambition for wide swaths of the economy and was seen as good, stable work with good benefits. “Now it’s difficult to recruit employees and difficult to retain them,” says Cohen. “The wage we can offer is not attractive enough compared to that in the private sector, and even to elsewhere in the public sector. To hire an employee, we publicize an opening, check that the employee meets certain prerequisites, and at certain levels we also use review committees, and at the end of the day, what is it all for? For 5,000-6,000 shekels ($1,500 – $1,800) a month? Candidates are giving up mid-process.”
Cohen notes that it is also difficult to retain current employees. “I’ve got nothing to give to an employee I appreciate. Today’s younger generation is looking for the here and now, they want to see their conditions improve as early as after six months on the job. They don’t have the patience to accumulate seniority, and I find myself losing plenty of young employees and being thrown back into the vicious cycle of looking for new hires.”
A shortage of 2,000 kindergarten assistant teachers: “A young woman post-military service doesn’t see herself working in a kindergarten for 32 shekels an hour”
The deteriorating situation is felt acutely in the field of preschool education assistant teachers. These assistants are employed by municipal authorities. The Center for Local Government estimates that there is a shortage of approximately 2,000 kindergarten assistant teachers for the upcoming school year, scheduled for September 1 . Tel Aviv alone faces a shortage of approximately 400 assistants, and Herzliya is about 160 assistants short.
Until a few years ago, work as a kindergarten assistant teacher was an attractive prospect for workers without a college degree. Regular, comfortable hours, summers and holidays off, and no expectation of having an additional job or of being available outside of work hours made the position desirable. “Nowadays, assistants’ duties have increased, as has their responsibility,” says Bar-Tal. “The assistant has to stay longer at the kindergarten to complete additional tasks. She’s constantly monitored and filmed from overhead all day long, and she has the parents to deal with. Activities have been added during summer and on school holidays, so it’s no longer worth it for mothers. Kindergarteners’ age has been lowered, so assistants are now dealing with younger children, some of whom are still in diapers, so they find themselves cleaning poop all day long for 32 shekels ($9.59) an hour.
The standard in Israel – two adults per 30 preschoolers – is the same as in the Third World, whereas in Western Europe it’s one assistant teacher per five children. And now they find themselves facing legal risks as well. If a child’s mother leaves the kindergarten and forgets to close the gate behind her, an assistant teacher could get arrested for that. If I were them, I’d leave too.”
Magen says that the assistant teacher job has a hard time competing with other jobs offered to young people nowadays. “The employees’ generation has changed. It’s a generation that’s used to working at Wolt (a food delivery service) and earning 150 shekels ($45) per hour, or to babysitting a single sleeping child in the evenings for 60 shekels ($18) an hour. Today, a 22- or 23-year-old woman, post-military service, doesn’t see herself working in a kindergarten, picking up toddlers and changing diapers. That’s not even an option for her. Certainly not in the public sector, where we’re limited as to the wage we can offer her.”
“We bring in people that are mediocre and less than mediocre, because I know that we’re not going to get the best”
In the face of such a serious shortage of employees, Cohen and her colleagues have to accept the fact that they’re going to fill positions with candidates who are not the most qualified people for the job. “Sometimes we simply can’t fill a position, and other times we compromise on quality,” she says. “We bring in people that are mediocre and less than mediocre, because I know in advance that we’re not going to get the best. Rarely do I have the option of picking and choosing between several candidates. In many cases candidates are applying just to take advantage of us, like when psychologists, engineers, or law graduates apply for jobs in local government when they’re only starting out their careers just so they could add a nice line to their résumé. They come and then after a year or two, maybe three, they leave. This adversely affects the service provided to citizens.”
She emphasizes that employees of the human resources departments of municipal governments also sorely need their work conditions to be adjusted to the current reality and to the workload that they bear. “We’re required to have a lot of knowledge, and that knowledge is constantly changing. We need educated people, ones who know how to read and implement the collective bargaining agreements. We have so much responsibility. An organization today needs to realize that it has to invest in its employees, first and foremost because it’s in the organization’s own best interest, because it increases productivity.”
7,000 shekels for a department head at a small municipality
Recruiting senior employees to local authorities is no simple task either, which is the result of, among other factors, payroll accounting that disadvantages executives at the smaller authorities. Three percent of local authorities’ employees are employed at senior wage, which is calculated based on a percentage of the salary of the executive director. But unlike in national government ministries, where the executive director’s salary is uniformly set at 39,500 shekels ($12,000) a month regardless of the ministry’s size, in local government there are eight pay grades for an executive director’s wage, according to the municipality’s size, and the salary of senior employees at that authority is also based on a percentage of those pay grades.
“Sixty percent of the authorities have up to 30,000 residents, which is Grade 3,” says Magen. “The executive director’s wage in such cities – for example, in Tirat Carmel, is up to 29,000 shekels ($8700). The wage of a department head at an authority is 30-40% of that, meaning around 10,000 shekels ($3000). A director at a small municipality is an even more demanding position – there directors have to do everything: serve as spokesperson, take care of business licensing, act as COVID-19 commissioner. A department head may sometimes manage several departments, and unlike in a big city – he has no assistants.” According to Magen, understandings are being worked out with the Ministry of Finance to cancel the lower Grades 1-2, where a director of a municipality can earn a mere 21,000 shekels ($6,300) and a department head can earn 7,000 shekels ($2,100).
20 years of deteriorating conditions
Magen points to a series of processes starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s which led to the low wages and unattractive conditions offered by local governments. The most prominent of these processes was the 1999 wage agreement, which severely restricted local authorities’ ability to make their own decisions as to which employee remuneration mechanisms to implement. The 1999 deal also prevents authorities from entering into wage agreements separate from the public sector’s comprehensive wage agreement. “Ever since the 1999 agreement, the principal tool that the authority has for remunerating employees is car value, approval of overtime – which for all intents and purposes constitutes work hours – and on-call duty hours. This is highly restrictive, mainly of the ability to reward excellence and hard work.”
The cancellation of the budgetary pension in 2000 also had a dramatic impact on working conditions of municipal government employees. Under the old system, according to Magen, “an employee who worked for six or seven years could already see the point where they’d start to retain pension rights.” The tenure granted to municipal employees, while it still exists, is no longer an attraction in today’s job market and in relation to the current salaries, certainly not in a reality where local government executives are trying to avoid layoffs as much as possible due to the personnel distress.
At the front of the COVID-19 struggle without a wage agreement: “Things started going downhill since 2018”
In this landscape, the framework agreements which the Histadrut entered into with the Ministry of Finance and the Center for Local Government offered employees some compensation for the downgrade in their conditions. “In 2016-2018 we felt we were actually moving in a good direction,” says Magen. “The previous framework agreement in the field, signed in 2016, provided a 7.9% increase to employees’ wages, and local governments decided to add a further 2% increment out of their own resources – meaning workers got a 9.9% raise. We also concurrently entered into agreements for various employee groups, such as education and community workers, lifeguards, planning committees, and others. We greatly promoted the issues of parental rights and gender equality.”
Magen says that things started going downhill in 2018. “We entered these endless loops of elections, no national budget being passed, and then COVID-19 on top of everything. With wages stagnant or even falling, it’s getting harder and harder to recruit employees, and current employees are choosing to leave.”
When the COVID-19 crisis emerged, everything changed. “Local authorities were at the forefront of the COVID-19 struggle”, says Cohen. “Our employees were the ones who provided all the services even when everything was closed down. They were the ones who had to deal with the frequently changing guidelines. The social workers and the welfare system went into a frenzy, the human resources teams had to deal with the frequently changing guidelines. The IT departments suddenly had to provide computers, train people on moving to Zoom, assist disadvantaged populations. The education department heads were working in a tailspin and had to plan and manage the classroom capsules and maintain contact with the parents. Ultimately, it wasn’t the Knesset that ran things and conducted day-to-day operations in the field, it was our employees.”
Though local governments have been able, by means of agreements with the national government and the Histadrut, to retain personnel and prevent employees from being sent on unpaid leave, first by utilizing days of leave and later by paying employees forced to stay at home 70% of their salary – Magen and Cohen say that people’s forced stay at home, with their leisure and family, has also changed some of the set of expectations in local government. They express their hope that the next framework agreement will include a provision for arranging a weekly day of remote work.
Magen: “There needs to be a double-digit wage increase for municipal government employees. I believe we’ll be able to bring good news"
Magen, who represents the local authorities, and Bar-Tal, who represents the employees, outline what they perceive as the required boundaries of the next wage agreement. “In the coming wage agreement, there needs to be a double-digit (percentage) salary increase for local authority employees, no doubt about it. And I believe we’ll be able to bring good news in that agreement,” clarifies Magen. “These are things I told the Wage Commissioner. As an employer, I have an interest in my employees being the most satisfied, because it’s crystal-clear to me that when the employee is satisfied, productivity is higher. On many points I see things eye-to-eye with the Histadrut, but I also have to look after the finances of the more disadvantaged authorities, and see to it that the state is indemnified when all is said and done.”
According to Magen, the wage increases in the public sector, as well as the minimum wage increase, must take into account mounting inflation, which this year alone is estimated at 4-4.5%, as well as the erosion of wages as a result of years without a new agreement. “Wage increases of one percent or one and a half percent per year in the public sector, as was the case in the previous framework agreements, are no longer enough. The coming agreement has to get at the root of the problem, not just do patchwork. There needs to be a revolution in municipal employees’ wages, of which the entry-level wages are currently very low.”
As an example of such a revolutionary measure, she mentions the “achievement” reform made in the employment of social workers, resulting from an agreement signed following a 17-day strike at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. The agreement included a significant wage increase of approximately 20% (and even more for lower pay grades), alongside a comprehensive reform of the wage structure. “That’s a flagship agreement that all sectors would do well to follow. A pay slip containing a single, clear bottom line, not one that you need some kind of guidebook to be able to read, like the pay slips issued to local authority employees today.”
Another group of municipal employees who need to be addressed specifically is kindergarten assistant teachers. “In the interim period we gave out bonuses and prescribed a wage increase for substituting for a kindergarten teacher, but we are in the midst of conducting comprehensive negotiations for them. As far as we’re concerned, kindergarten assistant teachers are part of the education system, and I think it would be right to link the wages of assistant teachers that are only just starting out to those of new schoolteachers.” Bar-Tal notes that kindergarten assistant teachers’ annual leave quota needs to be regulated vis-à-vis work at day camps during school holidays and the summer holiday – a subject which has caused labor disputes every year.
These are things that the next finance minister will have to take into account, and I really hope we’re not headed yet again into looping periods of no government and no budget,” says Magen. “We’ve signed the package deal that’s promised a new agreement in 2023, and as far as we’re concerned, we expect that check to be cashed.”
