After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon reached a compromise last Thursday preventing early elections and maintaining the coalition, the efforts by professional staff to implement the agreements in practice are running into difficult obstacles. The main dispute concerns the commitment made by Kahlon and Ministry of Finance director general Shai Babad at a press conference that the compromise would not involve a deviation from the budget framework. According to the current plan, the news division of the new Israel Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) will be closed, and all or most of its employees will be fired. In place of this division, in the first stage, scheduled to begin on May 15, the IBC will use the old Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) news division. The efforts by Ministry of Finance employees and the professional echelon to implement these vague agreements are arousing many difficulties. Some Ministry of Finance sources say the agreement is full of holes, and that whether it can be implemented at all is unclear.
Under the original bill, the annual budget for the IBC news division was NIS 160 million, and 100 IBC content personnel and journalists and 50 technicians were to have been joined by 150 IBA employees, bringing the total number of news division employees to 300. The Channel 1 news division has 400-500 employees (there is no clear definition of who exactly belongs to this division), and their average salary is obviously much higher. How can these people be fitted into the temporary news division without breaching the budget?
This matter is now under discussion by the Ministry of Finance professional echelon, including the Wage and Labor Agreements department, the budgets department, and the legal department. Some Ministry of Finance sources said that implementing the agreement on the timetable in question was an impossible task. This task is also supposed to include negotiations with IBA workers on cuts in their salaries for the purpose of adjusting them to the budget framework and the selection of the employees to be included in the temporary division. Even under the current plan, some workers in the IBA news division will have to be laid off, while at the same time, according to television news reports yesterday, there is also a dispute between Netanyahu's associates and those of Kahlon about the number of IBC employees, if any, to be included in the temporary news division. One possibility the Ministry of Finance is concerned about is that if the new division cannot be set up by May 15, as now seems likely, a proposal will be made to continue IBA broadcasts until a permanent news division is established. The Ministry of Finance strongly opposes this possibility.
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on April 4, 2017
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2017