UCAPSE - Union of Clerical, Administrative and Public Service Employee
New collective agreement boosts municipal pay
02.08.26
Pay and work hours in the Public Service
How can shorter workweeks and updated salaries modernise Israel’s public service
When public services operate at their best, they strengthen economic growth and productivity, cushion communities during national crises, and foster public trust in democratic institutions. High-quality public services depend on a skilled, motivated, and fairly compensated workforce. Ultimately, high-quality public service delivery depends on the ability to attract and retain skilled workers through competitive pay, manageable working hours, safe working conditions, meaningful career opportunities, and the dignity they deserve. Strong labour institutions and social dialogue are essential to achieving these economic and social outcomes. However, decades of fiscal austerity and real-wage suppression have created severe staffing shortages across Israel’s public sector, threatening worker well-being and service accessibility.
Working more, achieving less
This challenge is especially acute in Israel. The average Israeli employee logs over 2,000 working hours annually—equivalent to an extra month of work compared to the OECD average and nearly 300 hours more than in peer nations like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Israel also ranks at the bottom of the OECD for annual leave. But the long working hours in Israel have not translated into higher productivity. Despite working substantially longer hours, Israel’s hourly labour productivity remains well below the OECD average, demonstrating that productivity depends more on the quality of work organisation, skills, and investment than on the number of hours worked. Crucially, long hours disproportionately suppress women’s employment, deepening gender gaps.
Addressing this deficit is an active strategy already producing measurable results. To narrow the OECD gap, the Histadrut signed a landmark framework agreement in the summer of 2023, reducing the public-sector workweek from 42 to 40 hours, phased in across over 400,000 workers, without any reduction in pay. Today, the Public Sector workweek is set at 40 hours. It has already shown impressive outcomes, with roughly 35% of surveyed public sector workers reporting increased personal productivity, alongside marked drops in burnout and gains in work-life balance. But there is more we can do to achieve good standing in the OECD comparison.
Modernising salary systems
Shorter hours must be paired with fair, transparent payment structures. For too long, workers have been trapped in salary structures that predate the Minimum Wage Law, in which stagnant base pay is offset by “salary supplements” that are either fully or partially swallowed to meet the legal minimum. When they are entitled to new salary supplements or when the minimum wage goes up, those workers are left with no real raise. The Histadrut is working to reform salary structures by ensuring that basic rates reflect the skills and knowledge required of workers, that supplements are paid on top of basic rates, that workers are fully compensated for professional development and years of public service, and that high-performing departments or individuals earn the goal-based bonuses they deserve.
Israel also faces one of the largest pay gaps between public- and private-sector employees among OECD countries, making recruitment and retention increasingly difficult across essential public services. Reducing working time and reforming pay structures can make a substantial contribution to addressing staffing shortages, improving recruitment and retention, and strengthening the quality and resilience of public services.
The path forward
Having proven that reduced working hours boost operational performance rather than impair it, the goal moving forward is a sustained, data-driven strategy to steadily close the remaining gap with the developed world at an accelerated pace. This agenda for shorter workweeks and fair pay structures is ultimately a fight for the integrity of the entire workforce. Public services serve as the model employer for the entire national labour market. By setting high standards for work-life balance and worker compensation in state and municipal institutions, organised labour acts as the primary engine driving a healthier workforce, stronger social safety nets, and better public services nationwide.
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Key divisions and unions leading our work on the work conditions and compensation of the public sector
Organising, negotiating, and advocating to ensure fair pay, manageable hours, and dignifying workplace standards across state and municipal services.
Economic and Policy Division
Provides economic analyses, policy planning, and research that guide the Histadrut’s positions and agendas. It acts as an economic advisory body to the Histadrut leadership, trade unions, and local worker committees on all matters relating to intersectoral issues, sectoral bargaining and factory-level collective bargaining.
IUGE and UCAPSE unions
The Israeli Union of Government Employees (IUGE) and The Union of Clerical, Administration & Public Service Employees (UCAPSE) represent hundreds of thousands of municipal, government, and administrative personnel across Israel.
Each union actively negotiates sector-wide and local collective agreements that target long-standing structural inequities in government departments and local authorities.
Social Workers Union and Nurses Union
The Israel Union of Social Workers and The Israeli Nurses Union represent two of the public sector’s most essential workforces – both of which are overwhelmingly female-dominated. Historically, public caregiving and social service professions have suffered from systemic undervaluation, leading to persistent pay disparities, burnout, and hazardous working conditions.
Both unions work to correct structural wage inequities. Their bargaining and advocacy go beyond pay scale updates and shortening the workweek. They also work to address the specific realities that stem from the lack of valuing for “care work”, the need for compensation models that accommodate family caregiving responsibilities, the need for career advancement tracks that treat caregiving fields as specialised professions rather than lower-paid auxiliary services, and the high rates of frontline aggression workers are facing.
Health and academic unions
Union of Psychologists, the Union of Medical Laboratory Workers, Radiographers, and Allied Health Professions, the Union of Academics in Social Sciences and Humanities (MACH’AR), and the Union of State Research Workers, also play a vital role in securing better pay and working conditions of specialised professionals across state and public institutions. By negotiating local collective agreements tailored to the specific operational realities of their fields, and by supporting sector-wide collective bargaining efforts, they ensure that health professionals, researchers, and academic specialists maintain their unyielding voices within the wider public service framework.
Arlozorov Forum
Serving as the Histadrut’s socio-economic research institute, the Arlozorov Forum provides the empirical foundation for trade union policy on working hours, labour productivity, and public sector compensation. By examining global OECD labour benchmarks alongside local workplace data, the Forum directly informed the 2023 public-sector framework agreement. It continues to generate rigorous local evidence that provides the Histadrut data-driven framework for modernising pay structures, closing productivity gaps, and advocating for a shorter, more equitable workweek across Israel’s economy.