Collective Bargaining Agreements and Protected Groups in Israel

Abstract

While employment discrimination and labor law have been studied extensively, the potential of collective bargaining agreements to combat such discrimination has received limited attention. To address this gap, I undertook a comprehensive study of all provisions in Israeli collective agreements over a 60-year period, from 1957 to 2016 (35,520 collective agreements total), inquiring into provisions for the most frequently mentioned worker groups – women, elderly workers, people with disabilities, and parents. I found the group most intensively represented in collective agreements to be that of elderly workers. Moreover, while collective bargaining agreements in Israel promoted both equality for targeted groups and discriminatory practices against them, the prevalence of discriminatory provisions declined over the years. Finally, I compared rights in collective agreements with their contemporaneous legislative status, finding that the combination of collective agreements and legislation has been essential for promoting equality in Israel. In several cases, collective bargaining agreements played a critical role in promoting innovative equality practices, which legislators later adopted. Elsewhere, legislation abolished discriminatory provisions in collective agreements. Yet in all cases, the transparency of collective agreements (in contrast to the confidentiality of individual contracts) proved indispensable to promoting equality