Israel Matzav

'Let us have a raise in salary'

As I am sure many of you are aware, we Jews believe that Simana Miltha Hee (a sign is meaningful) and therefore on Rosh HaShanna we eat things like the head of a fish (so that we will be the head and not the tail), pomegranates (so that we will have merits like the seeds of a pomegranate), fish (so that we will be fruitful and multiply like fish) etc. In our house, we joke about two other signs: We eat meat so that God should bring us good tidings (the word for meat in Hebrew is basar and the word for bringing tidings is l'vaseir) and we eat lettuce, raisins and celery and say 'let us have a raise in salary.'

Israel's medical residents must have eaten a lot of lettuce, raisins and celery two weeks ago and apparently it is going to pay off. Prime Minister Netanyahu has ordered that they be given a raise in salary.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday instructed Finance Ministry representatives involved in negotiations with medical residents to grant young doctors working solely in the public sector a salary hike of thousands of shekels.

The Prime Minister's Office added in a statement that Netanyahu was continuing his efforts to improve conditions for medical residents who have turned in resignation letters as part of a labor dispute.

Earlier on Monday, Netanyahu summoned Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Deputy Health Minister Ya'acov Litzman for an emergency meeting regarding the mass resignation of medical residents earlier in the day. Litzman said they hoped to reach a solution in a short period of time, Army Radio reported.

The state also sought an injunction from the National Labor Court Monday afternoon that would order medical residents to return to work. Several hundred medical residents resigned and did not show up for work Monday morning as part of a labor dispute in the health system.

Following the mass resignation, Steinitz called on the residents to return to work. "We all need to respect the law and the rule of law," Steinitz said in a statement, urging the medical residents to "hold discussions with us. We are looking for creative ways to improve certain things within the already-written agreement with doctors, including additional money."

The government was also considering ordering a transfer of more senior doctors to departments where the residents' absence has created backups. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein already signed off on such a process, which still needs to be authorized by the director-general of the Health Ministry, Army Radio reported.

I believe it's more important to the public that the young doctors stop working 36-hour shifts. I sleep very little, but I don't make life and death decisions, and I don't see how anyone who has worked 24 hours straight - let alone 36 - can make those decisions (for the record, my record for consecutive hours worked is 42 and after that stretch I would not have trusted myself to make any life and death decisions).

But yes, they are also grossly underpaid. In this country, staj (apprenticeship) is common in many - nearly all - professions. It's slave labor. (When I did staj as a lawyer here, after working for seven years in the US, I was paid $1,000 per month and when I did a $42 million stock offering in the US while I was doing staj - for which my boss was paid $125,000 - he gave me a $400 bonus. No, I am not exaggerating). For the doctors it just goes on much longer.

Labels: Israeli medical care, medical residents

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:32 PM