A monopoly union’s upper hand

Indeed, they are even willing to plunge the economy into a devastating strike to order to continue exploiting their monopoly privileges.

It is time for all those who understand how necessary and crucial the economic reform plan is – whatever its faults – not to desert the field to Histadrut nomenclatura and its regressive allies. We should not be intimidated by the emotional blackmail of the so-called social lobby, made up mostly from people holding cushy jobs in a welfare industry that thrives on the growing number of poor and the destitute.

The Histadrut and the welfare bureaucracy do not really represent the best interests of the poor and the weak. In fact, the more money is poured into welfare – it is now over a third of the government’s budget – the number of the poor and the income gap actually grow.

Israel’s productive citizens, whose heavy taxes finance the welfare industry, must finally make their voices heard. They must call for economic reforms that will break the stranglehold of the very rich, the handful of owners and banks who control Israel’s exploitative monopolies, and their Histadrut allies, representing the powerful and equally exploitative monopoly workers unions.

It is time for the silent majority of hardworking Israelis and those who are forced into unemployment by our regressive anti-growth economic system to stand up and be counted. The first step is to oppose Peretz and to support the economic plan that stops our slide toward catastrophe. It is a prerequisite for wide ranging structural reforms.

The noisy opponents of reform do not have most of the public on their side. In fact, many members of the public, who know how the Histadrut keeps exploiting the lower paid workers for the benefit of well-heeled public monopoly unions, how it has despoiled the workers’ pension funds and stymied growt – treat the Histadrut’s hypocritical claims that it is protecting the weak with contempt.

But alas, they remain a silent majority. With plentiful public resources and loans from banks at their disposal, the Histadrut nomenclatura is able to run huge disinformation campaigns and mount demonstrations and rallies peopled by their hired guns and assorted vested interests, especially from the welfare industry.

They unfortunately enjoy almost total support from the media. It helps the Histadrut bamboozle the public and pose as a public-spirited organization whose sole concern in undermining reform – even at a great risk of ruining the economy – is the protection of the weak.

BUT IT will be the weak that would first suffer from economic breakdown. The media does not bother to expose the truth about Peretz, to expose Histadrut corruption or to investigate how a bankrupt Histadrut, that owes about NIS 1.5 billion to the banks, can afford to spend hundreds of thousands on its campaigns? True to its habits, the Israeli media is simply recycling all the negative inventions of the reform opponents.

They interview mostly those who would undermine it, assisting them with leading questions and never, but never, challenging their false assumptions or claims. The media almost never exposes the hypocrisy of a Histadrut whose record of inflicting great harm on workers, especially those it employed in the past in its failed economic empire, or those it dismisses these very days without adequate compensation.

Little is said about why the Israeli economy, boasting perhaps the best human capital in the world, performs so miserably or why it offers such miserable wages to its dedicated and talented workers. The answer however is clear: economic growth has been almost totally choked by the distorted system created by years of Histadrut dominance in the economy and especially in labor markets.

The media can get away with such bias and distortions because it meets little opposition. The few who do oppose it never get proper exposure.

But this should not deter those who believe that the struggle for economic reform is vital for the very survival of Israel as a viable democracy, and as a productive entity capable of tackling its many social problems and its heavy defense burden. They must find legal and civil ways to oppose the big lies of the Histadrut and its media henchmen.

They can do so through spontaneous grassroots write-in and call-in campaigns and demonstrations, such as those undertaken recently, for the first time ever, by a group of university students who decided not to remain a silent majority.

Watching these demonstrations from the sidelines, I was struck by how much sympathy they obviously garnered, but also by the passivity of most of those who witnessed the demonstrations (with the notable exception of a group of senior citizens).

This is especially striking among the young who seem to dismiss such civil action, so popular everywhere among their age group, with either expressions of despair or of cynicism. Having experienced the futility of so many demonstrations, the fact that public opinion is either distorted in Israel or ignored, they feel most discouraged about the prospect of being able to change matters by democratic means.

Next to the danger posed by the opponents of reform to the viability of the Israeli economy, public apathy or despair pose the greatest challenge to the health of Israeli democracy.

Israelis usually excuse their apathy by justly pointing to a lack of leadership. But in the case of the struggle for saving the economy from ruin, they cannot make this claim. Even the opponents of Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will have to concede that he took huge political risk by courageously undertaking this most arduous and thankless task.

Even those who are rightfully critical of our ministers must marvel at their endorsement of a plan that will cut the bloated budgets of their ministries. Despite his political rivalry with Netanyahu, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given his full backing to the economic plan (though one would wish he would be a little more emphatic about it).

So now it is the turn of the citizens, the heavily taxed Israeli voters to find a way to have their voices heard.

Dare we hope that they will rise to the occasion, that they will make known what they think about the Histadrut aparatchiks who want to plunge the country into chaos and the economy toward ruin?

Or will they passively allow Peretz to ruin their lives?