Left-leaning (but sympathetic --- yes, there are some, among "leftists of the old school") observers of Israel are often astonished at the deep contempt in which the average working-class Israeli holds the country's trade union. The following story may shed some light on the "hows and whys" of this.
Last night the Israel Channel 2 had a show on about labor relations in a chemical plant in the desert town of Dimona. The identity of the company is not terribly relevant: I have seen many similar examples.
The plant was privatized some fifteen years ago. Veteran employees were given new labor contracts that essentially gave them their existing compensation and benefits plus more --- no new employees can he hired under this contract. Less established employees were offered labor contracts rather more in line with prevailing market conditions, while the remainder was let go and their work outsourced to personnel contractors, selected by public tender. There is severe competition among the contractors, and in order to be able to put in the lowest bid, they have to "absorb" serious cuts every year, which they pass on to their employees. As a result, the latter basically earn minimum wage, without any benefits --- and can be dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons. (One particular contractor employee interviewed was involved in an accident that caused serious chemical burns on his feet --- but was pressured by the contractor not to report the accident because his crew would miss out on the "work safety award" bonus. When he refused to comply he was dismissed.)
So much for the "heartless capitalists", who do more or less what one would expect them to do with the hand they have been dealt ("met de hen uitgedeelde kaarten"). Now what about the self-appointed "defenders of the downtrodden", the trade union and the Worker's Council? They work... at getting ever more perks for the "grade A" veteran employees, occasionally manage to get a bone thrown the way of the "grade B" employees, and do diddly-squat ("niks nul de botten") for the contractor employees --- not even represent those who were crealy terminated in an abusive manner. (They are too busy organizing 5-star vacation packages to Thailand for the "grade A" employees: one Worker's Council head honcho proudly told the camera that a festive evening they organized --- contractor employees not invited --- had cost a whopping NIS 750,000, or about US$165,000.)
As a result, you have a situation where employees doing the identical work get wage and benefit packages that differ by a factor of ten --- without any relationship to job performance or economic value.
This latter situation is fairly widespread in older organizations here, both in our bloated "pakidstan" (slang for gov't bureaucracy) and in other organizations that at some point in their existence were something other than private enterprise. I know, for instance, about academic institutions where some veteran technicians and lab assistants bring home more pay than full professors, and others have contractually guaranteed fictitious overtime packages that would imply them working more than 24 hours/day. Some of these employees are whizzes at their jobs and truly indispensible --- and would command hefty salary packages under market conditions as well. Many others basically bum around all day --- in many cases because their specialties have become obsolete (like glass-blowing) and they refuse to be retrained into something new, knowing that in practice they cannot be fired for anything short of felony. (The Workers' Councils will resort to any means fair and foul to block the firing of such employees for demonstrated incompetence or redundancy --- in part because their fear the setting of precedents.) And these may have newly hired colleagues one or two benches down the lab that work their behinds off for a tiny fraction of their salaries, and with no more job security than they would have working for private enterprise.
Unlike many American "conservatives" who see trade unions as an evil in and of themselves, I consider them a necessary evil in the same fashion as counsel for the defendant at trials --- as a vehicle (ideally self-organized and grass-roots) for defending employees against employer abuses. What happens here, however, is that the trade unions --- despite mouthing all the right pious platitutes about standing up for the socially underprivileged --- have degenerated into nothing more than a lobby for defending and even widening the entrenched privileges of a small group of people with plum jobs, and in practice compound on the alleged "social injustice" of "the capitalist jungle market" with the all-too-real social injustice of a nomenklatura.