Yael Paz-Melamed on Shelly Yechimovitz, the journalist with an agenda who recently joined Amir Peretz in the Labor Party, Maariv print version 12/1/05:

…If Yechimovitz was a little less decisive about her world view, she would perhaps look more seriously at the economic reality of recent years. And that reality is that there is no longer something that can be called workers. There is no connection between the people who work in the Bank of Israel, or the Electricity Company, or the sea port workers, on the one hand, and the workers who put in ten hours a day and hardly make the minimum wage, on the other. Moreover, in many cases the exploiting class is not the employees, but the layer of well-fed well-paid employees of companies like the Electricity Company, the privatization of which is being opposed by Yechimovitz and opposed by Amir Peretz.

If she listened a bit more to the industrialists, not the big ones like Teva, Elite and Osem, but the smaller ones, struggling to keep afloat a company that employs a hundred or so workers, the ones that for months don’t take salaries for themselves, not even minimal salaries. Because there is no money, and they have to pay the workers first, even if they are paid minimum wages. These industrialists look with yearning at the well established employees around them, and at the many benefits they have managed to get from the state – their employee - down the years, the same benefits which Amir Peretz and Yechimovitz have declared all out war to prevent their cancellation. As a journalist, Yechimovitz never interviewed such employers, it is doubtful that she even knows they exist. This is the agenda that twists reality.

(My very humble translation).

Judy helped me make sense of it all, when she commented that Peretz sounded very ‘Old Labour’, in UK terms.

I also get my salary from the government, not a salary like the Electricity Company emloyees, nowhere near, but I am aware of how very fortunate I am, and that in the private sector I would be earning half for doing the same thing.

This is not to say that the work we do does not supply a vital service without which the country could not function. Quite the opposite. And to do it properly we have to be reasonably well fed or corruption would become the rule (this is still far from the case). But we could be far more efficient, if we were pressed to be. Our public function is such that we are not destined to be privatized, although certain parts of the organization have been privatized successfully since I’ve been working there (since 1989), mainly those offering services, such as catering, maintanance of the large fleet of vehicles, etc.

During my blogbreak I spent a lot of time thinking about my workplace and the inefficiency, the lethargy and the faulty decision making process that is inherent to it. This is probably the case in any government organization that supplies a vital service to the public and is not expected to show material profit.

I may write a proper post about it.