Firemen are protesting against a reduction in their salaries. The Ministry of Finance says they are being overpaid.
The average gross monthly salary of Israeli employees was NIS 7,875 in November 2009. Trend figures for September-November 2009 showed an annualized drop of 2.4% in constant prices, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported today. As usual, Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) and Mekorot National Water Company employees had the highest average salary, followed by the financial sector, public administration, manufacturing, and transportation.
1 comments:
Overpaid and underworked civil servants are a major problem in the US (and apparently worldwide). Unlike a business, there is no measure of profit and loss to determine whether the revenues of the enterprise can support certain wage levels and employee numbers. Therefore these are determined solely thru politics and with a tendency to creep ever higher. In "advanced" societies, government employees themselves form a substantial and powerful voting bloc, so they can in effect vote themselves high wages at the ballot box. The only limit is how much taxation they can get away with before individual taxpayers and businesses flee the jurisdiction (and even then you can, as Greece has, borrow the money to pay your employees, at least for a while) and this is a very high limit since there are high costs and disruptions associated with moving and people have many reasons for staying aside from pure economics. No one does anything about this until the situation is in extreme crisis and even then the gov't employees don't want to listen to reality.
The same dynamic goes on with large private employers with unionized workforce. Recently the employees of a Ford factory in the US voted against certain cuts approved by their union leaders. Even though the other 2 US car companies are now bankrupt and Ford only barely hung on, the workers were utterly convinced that their bosses were rolling in money and were just trying to cheat them. There is no amount of evidence that would convince them otherwise.
K
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