The militant teacher: A case study in Israel

In Israel, for a long period of time, there were close ties between the labor movement (the Histadrut) and the government and, to keep inflation down, the government often favored lower wage increases and opposed strikes. Consequently, workers frequently expressed their militancy by taking action against their union leaders to make some demands upon employers. We, therefore, felt that it was likely that the lower the person in the union hierarchy, the more likely the worker would be militant. However, the findings of our study of National Union of Teachers' officers refuted this premise. We discovered instead that the key indicators of militancy among teachers were sex (male), their perceptions of too much centralization in the union structure, their dissatisfaction with union goal attainments, and the extent of their sensitivity to public hostility toward teachers. Thus those officers who felt alienated in their job, from their union and from society were found to be the most militant regardless of their place in the union hierarchy.