Labour And The Political Economy In Israel

This is the first comprehensive account in any language of Israel's central labour organization, the Histradut, and the Israeli Labour Party, which dominated politics for more than four decades. The author develops a political economy approach which draws on contemporary theories of labour movements, labour markets, and state/economy relations. In comparison with the corporatist social democracies of Western Europe, the Israeli case is shown to be in many ways paradoxical. Shalev demonstrates that unravelling these paradoxes provides both challenges and insights for comparative studies of the advanced capitalist democracies. At the same time, he offers students of Israeli society a critical alternative to previous scholarship on labour relations, left-wing politics, and domestic public policy. This volume provides a controversial and theoretically informed assessment of the historical record, complemented by a novel interpretation of the dramatic political and economic instability which surfaced in Israel during the 1970s.

This is the first comprehensive account in any language of Israel's central labour organization, the Histradut, and the Israeli Labour Party, which dominated politics for more than four decades. The author develops a political economy approach which draws on contemporary theories of labourmovements, labour markets, and state/economy relations. In comparison with the corporatist social democracies of Western Europe, the Israeli case is shown to be in many ways paradoxical. Shalev demonstrates that unravelling these paradoxes provides both challenges and insights for comparativestudies of the advanced capitalist democracies. At the same time, he offers students of Israeli society a critical alternative to previous scholarship on labour relations, left-wing politics, and domestic public policy. This volume provides a controversial and theoretically informed assessment ofthe historical record, complemented by a novel interpretation of the dramatic political and economic instability which surfaced in Israel during the 1970s.

The resurgence of political economy as an important topic reflects the deep interpenetration of politics and economics. There are few economic issues of consequence that are not shaped by government decisions, and there are few governments whose agendas are not dominated by economic issues. No country reflects the interpenetration of politics and economics as much as Israel.In this analysis, Ira Sharkansky examines the extensive involvement of the Israeli government in the country's economy, reflected in governmental expenditures that exceed the gross national product, intimate links between governmental activity and Israeli's standard of living, high inflation and other economic problems, and policymaking behaviors that include entrepreneurialism and indirection. He explores the strategic points of Israel's political economy, pursuing a qualitative analysis of Israeli problems and strategies for dealing with them. Those interested in policy analysis, political economy, comparative politics, comparative public administration, and Israeli politics will find this book invaluable.Contents: The Political Economy of Israel; What is the Israeli State? How Large is the Government Budget?; Israel's Standard of Living; Israeli Municipalities: Local Initiative amidst Central Controls; Who Gets What amidst High Inflation? Winners and Losers in the Israeli Budget 1978-1984; Conundrums of Israel's Political Economy: Problems without Solutions; Public Sector Entrepreneurialism; Policymaking by Indirection; Perspective on Israel's Political Economy.

The debate about globalisation and its discontents

This book examines the flow of Palestinian labour to Israel over the last three decades, and shows how it has fluctuated over time, with, most recently, a shift in the flow towards Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

This book constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive description, history, and analysis of Israel's economy. Plessner examines events of the past two decades and advances the hypothesis that problems within the Israeli economy can be explained by the extent of its departure from the institutions and rules that govern predominantly market economies. He argues that Israel is unusual in that it affords an opportunity to analyze a socialized economy embedded in a democratic society. Individual chapters describe Israel's economic growth and stagnation, the government's domination of capital and credit markets, and the absence of a truly independent private sector. The concluding chapter evaluates the stabilization program of the 1980s and its aftermath and provides a prognosis for the future. Told within the framework of the story of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state, this book answers the question of why the Israeli economy finds itself today in the same state in which it has languished since 1973.

Using a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007, Labor in Israel investigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel’s political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel’s complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor’s relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel’s history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he shows the ways in which the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the labor movement regime. Organized labor is now trying to renegotiate its place in contemporary Israel, a society that no longer accepts labor’s longstanding claim to be the representative of the people. As such, Preminger concludes that organized labor in Israel is in a transitional and unsettled phase in which new marginal initiatives, new organizations, and new alliances that have blurred the boundaries of the sphere of labor have not yet consolidated into clear structures of representation or accepted patterns of political interaction.