Employees of Haaretz will go on an open-ended strike beginning Wednesday
afternoon, the newspaper’s employees committee said Tuesday.
“Tomorrow,
all of us, employees of all sections of the paper and the online edition, are
going on strike,” the announcement said. It added that “no employee will take
pictures, no worker will write articles, no one will edit, design, produce or
interview until the end of the strike. Remember: there is no paper
without journalists.”
The workers, who face wide-scale layoffs in the
near future, said that at 4 p.m. Wednesday they will hold a meeting inside the
paper’s headquarters on Schocken Street in south Tel Aviv, after which they will
launch the open-ended strike.
The workers said that management continues
to ignore their protest efforts, creating the need for more drastic
measures.
Last Sunday night, Haaretz employees held a partial work
stoppage, shutting down the paper for around two hours in what was the first
such action by the paper’s employees.
Shouting “No newspaper without
journalists,” employees of Haaretz and TheMarker– which is published in
cooperation with Haaretz – blocked the Schocken Street headquarters and demanded
answers about the size and scope of the impending layoffs.
While the
employees have said they are still not sure how many will be laid off, they have
been told by management that around 80 of the paper’s 400 employees will be
fired in the near future.