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Using a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007,Labor in Israelinvestigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel's political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel's complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor's relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel's history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he shows the ways in which the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the labor movement regime. Organized labor is now trying to renegotiate its place in contemporary Israel, a society that no longer accepts labor's longstanding claim to be the representative of the people. As such, Preminger concludes that organized labor in Israel is in a transitional and unsettled phase in which new marginal initiatives, new organizations, and new alliances that have blurred the boundaries of the sphere of labor have not yet consolidated into clear structures of representation or accepted patterns of political interaction.

Introduction : an inquiry into labor in Israel in the 21st century -- Neoliberalism, neocorporatism and worker representation -- The rise of labor activism -- The old structures : corrupt, fossilized, irrelevant? -- Taking the struggle beyond the workplace -- Renegotiating the role of the Histadrut -- The frontal struggle : recognition in the workplace -- The ideological struggle : the delegitimization of organized labor -- The institutional struggle : undermining the labor courts -- Labor representation outside union structures -- Pluralism and the changing nature of politics -- Between national community and class solidarity -- Porous labor market, insular political community -- Conclusion : beyond nationalism and neoliberalism?

abstractIn light of the labor movement’s prominence in Israel’s history, the recent resurgence of unionizing activity after some 30 years of organized labor’s decline has caused much scholarly debate. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to political ‘climate’, the wider social context, and the ‘battle of ideas’. This article therefore discusses the status of organized labor in media discourse, the rhetoric against the labor courts, liberalization in legal reasoning, and how organized labor is construed by the courts, as well as the conceptual differentiation between ‘workers’ and ‘the public’. It concludes that both organized labor and vestigial corporatist institutions are facing delegitimizing rhetoric and proposes that, for a fuller assessment of union revitalization, we should pay attention to labor struggles on three planes: the frontal struggle in the workplace, the institutional struggle to shore up the institutions crucial to collective labor relations, and the ideological struggle against the narrative of delegitimation.

PurposeBoth the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism.Design/methodology/approachThe proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus.FindingsWorkers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment.Originality/valueIn light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.

The material presented in part 2 suggests that the challenge to labor’s privileged position in the neocorporatist labor relations regime is an important element in the shift in the balance of power away from organized labor and toward capital. Though this regime no longer exists as it did in the 1950s and 1960s, and labor’s “privileged position” has been under attack for at least four decades (see the introduction; Maor 2012), various structures and institutions of this regime are still available to workers who wish to use them, as we saw in part 1, protecting labor and delimiting capital’s maneuvering

The feeling that the Histadrut or other old frameworks are not representing the workers sufficiently was common in many campaigns. While the Histadrut itself may be part of the establishment, the workers themselves are not, and in some cases it is precisely this establishment they oppose. The workers, then, feel they are not part of the “negotiated order” (Strauss 1978), a feeling that led to widespread participation and anger toward the Histadrut’s supposedly dictatorial behavior. However, the campaigns also illustrate the desire to take the struggle beyond the workplace, to influence state policies and involve the public—to “explain” the situation,

Employers’ attempts to prevent an organizing initiative are relatively new to Israel because unionizing itself is new. (Though there was a wave of organizing following the National Health Insurance Law of 1995, employers’ adamant opposition is mostly characteristic of the most recent wave.) Before the weakening of the Histadrut, unionizing unorganized workers was unnecessary: the vast majority of waged workers were already Histadrut members, or members in the National Histadrut or one of the few independent trade unions. According to the head of the new Journalists Organization (JO) noted in part 1, when the idea of organizing journalists was first