Following the announcement of a unilateral plan from the Finance Ministry to decrease firefighters’ salaries, the Histadrut announced on Monday that it was taking steps to protect the firefighters’ salaries. “It’s not clear to us how during the hour of emergency and war, they are fighting the firefighters instead of doing good for them and making it easier for them to do their loyal duty and to risk their lives, instead of being troubled with problems of income and livelihood,” Gil Bar-Tal, head of the Histadrut’s public service workers union, wrote to Fire Commissioner Eyal Caspi. As part of the union’s action against the planned salary cut, firefighters will stop participating in instructional courses to train new members of the force.
Negotiations between the Finance Ministry and the firefighters, as represented by the Histadrut, have been ongoing since 2017, when the last agreement with the force expired. Insurance for firefighters was one issue raised, as was the lack of additional pay for firefighters working during the war in dangerous areas. Salaries were also discussed in the negotiations, but the Finance Ministry then made the unilateral decision to recommend that the Ministry of National Security reduce firefighters’ salaries starting in November.
The Finance Ministry claimed that the salary reduction was the correction of “a number of significant discrepancies and errors” in the way wages were being calculated. The ministry accused the union of withdrawing from the negotiation and said that it had “no choice but to implement the Ministry of Finance's decisions on the matter.”
“Firefighters, who protect human life and property, deserve public support,” Bar-Tal said. “During routine times, they come to fires, accidents, and various occurrences. Now, more than during routine times, they risk their lives, and I would expect an equivalent way of relating to them and not obtuseness and rigidity from the people at the Finance Ministry. Firefighters should be given boatloads of salary additions, not given salary reductions and being prevented from being insured against the risk of being injured on the job.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
