General Strike Briefly Shuts Down Israel
A general strike by Israel’s public sector ended on Monday after four hours of near paralysis across in the economy.
The strike took place from 6:00 A.M. to 10 A.M., after Labor Court President Nili Arad decided after a night of deliberations to limit it to only four hours.
The strike included trains, buses, universities, government ministries and municipalities. Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv was also closed.
Due to the strike, many Israelis prepared accordingly and opted to take other modes of transportation rather than trains and buses, causing massive traffic jams.
Israeli airline El Al decided to reschedule all of its flights to Sunday night, so most people were able to fly out of Israel before the strike took effect.
The Labor Court finished its deliberations in the early morning hours, but sent off its decision limiting the duration of the strike only after the strike began. The deliberations took over five hours, after talks between Ofer Eini, head of the Histadrut Labor Federation and Finance Minister Steinitz ended without a breakthrough.
The Histadrut, the umbrella organization for hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, wants the government to hire some 250,000 contract workers, who have working conditions that are inferior to those of civil workers that are directly on government payrolls.
For more, go to []Haaretz.com](http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-s-general-strike-ends-after-four-hours-of-disruptions-1.394171 “]Haaretz.com”)
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
