Trends in Labour Law — Forty Years of Israeli Law

תקציר

Two contradictory trends can be discerned in the development of labour law in Israel. On the one hand, there is the socio-philosophical approach which guided those who fashioned labour law in its early stages of development. This ideological, even doctrinaire, approach lay behind a long series of laws, especially between the years 1948-1964, and guided the Labour Courts since their establishment in 1969. The second trend, and one that is becoming more marked, is pragmatism. Especially since the early 1970s, labour laws have been characterized by pragmatism and by a retreat from the ideology-doctrinaire approach. The pragmatic approach is characterized by legislative and executive intervention in autonomous labour relations, by ad hoc decisions, and by a desire to achieve short-term, immediate economic and political objectives, even at the cost of harming important long-term principles. In some cases, it would have been possible to achieve these same objectives by alternative methods that would not have undermined the impressive structure of Israeli labour law principles.