Hauling Industry
[:en]Movilei Dror’s truck drivers on strike They Demand stopping arbitrary salary cuts[:]
[:en]On Tuesday 12.7, the truck drivers of Movilei Dror Company
14/07/2016
[:en]On Tuesday 12.7, the truck drivers of Movilei Dror Company
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After more than four months of futile negotiations, the Independent Trade Union Centre WAC-MAAN has declared a labor dispute and strike at the haulage firm Movilei Dror
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On Wednesday September 9, 2015, Movilei Dror, one of biggest
WAC MAAN director Assaf Adiv: We are entering a negotiation process with the management, and we are doing this with a positive attitude. We believe we can reach a collective agreement that will secure drivers’ rights and compensate them for past wrongs. Having said that, should it become clear that the management remains unmoved by the drivers’ demands, we will not hesitate to re-establish a workplace dispute and consider strike action.
The independent trade union centre WAC MAAN, representing the truck
At the beginning of June, the court ruled on a petition submitted by the Workers Advice Center (WAC) and drivers from the Hamenia transportation company who had organized with WAC. The ruling on this labor dispute was handed down in the Tel Aviv Regional Labor Court by Judge Michal Levitt. Hamenia, one of the longest-standing companies in haulage in Israel, was adamantly against recognizing WAC’s right to act as a union and even refused to recognize its employees’ membership in the organization, and asked the court to reject the petition and prevent WAC from representing its employees.
Intolerable working conditions and a harmful payment system characterize the situation of drivers employed by trucking companies in Israel. The center of this system is the procedure that allows these companies to pay their drivers not according to actual hours of work but according to the value of the loads they carry. Actually the trucking industry in Israel does not even count the drivers’ hours; thus it diminishes the possibility of a system that would limit driving time, increasing the dangers that go with long hours on the road.
A visit by Workers Advice Center (WAC-Maan) representatives to the Netherlands’ largest trade union, the FNV, revealed the enormous gap between an Israeli trucker’s wage and that of his Dutch counterpart. While in the Netherlands a truck driver works eight hours a day (48 hours a week) and earns some NIS 10,000 (2,000 euro) basic wage, in Israel a truck driver often has to work at least 12 hours a day (68 hours a week) for just NIS 7,000 (1,400 euro, including bonuses). This works out at NIS 48 (9.6 euro) per hour for the Dutch driver, and just NIS 24 (4.8 euro) for the Israeli driver – exactly half.
