An oleh who really made it work

In his role as mediator, recently retired National Labor Court president Steve Adler made significant inroads in the thorny arena of labor relations.

By DAN IZENBERG
Steve Adler 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Steve Adler 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Judge Steve Adler, who retired last month after serving for 13 years as president of the National Labor Court, is frequently cited as a model for the successful aliya of an immigrant from an English-speaking country.
Adler reached a position of great influence in the area of labor relations, one of the more crucial and potentially explosive aspects of Israeli life. Beyond that, he left his own personal stamp on many issues that came up during his term in office which, most observers of the labor scene agree, was a great success.
An outstanding achievement was his ability to mediate among the three most powerful forces in the economy – the government, the labor union (Histadrut) and the employers.
His second major accomplishment came in the form of the decisions he made to help unorganized workers in the private sector. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Adler pointed out that the number of unionized workers in the private sector dropped from 85 percent in the mid-1980s to 30% today.
In the more limited sphere of labor relations, Adler can be compared with retired Supreme Court president Aharon Barak. Like Barak, he was an “activist” judge who tried to interpret laws that were often outdated and adjust them to the current realities of the workplace. He did so by going beyond their literal wording and analyzing the underlying aim of the legislator. In some cases, the Knesset passed laws in accordance with his judicial rulings.
By the same token, Adler had his ideological foes, the most outspoken of whom was Uriel Lynn, chairman of the Association of Chambers of Commerce, the representative of the business sector. In 2003, six years after Adler was appointed president of the National Labor Court, Lynn led a drive to dissolve the separate labor court system and merge the labor courts with the magistrate’s courts. This campaign led to the establishment of a committee headed by retired Supreme Court justice Yitzhak Zamir, which examined all the issues related to the labor courts.
Little came of it. The crisis evaporated and, if anything, the labor court system is stronger than before. Perhaps the main contributing factor in the change of heart was Adler’s success in mediating between the country’s powerful economic forces and preventing one major strike after another.
According to one account, there were threats to paralyze the economy in 1997, 1998, 2003, 2004 and 2007. Among other matters, the threats involved privatizing the Histadrut-administered pension funds, the failure of local authorities to pay their workers’ salaries, privatizing the ports and the demands of the Secondary School Teachers Union. In all these cases, Adler managed to mollify the parties and persuade them to compromise.
HOW DID a man who knew enough Hebrew to recite the prayers but could barely speak the language when he first came here, and who was initially worried that he would be unable to earn a living, get so far? Adler, who came from a Modern Orthodox family and wears a black (i.e., ideologically neutral) kippa, was born on February 17, 1941, and grew up in New York City. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1962 and his master’s from the Columbia University Law School in 1965.
He did not come from a wealthy family and from early on felt a concern for and identification with the working class. During summer vacations at Cornell, he worked for the Retail-Wholesale Department Store Union – “the most radical union in the United States,” as he put it – which organized all the small businesses in New York City. At Columbia he worked as a legal assistant to the main general counsel for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. His first job after graduating was with the National Labor Relations Board in Washington.
After moving to California in 1968 and in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, Adler decided to come to Israel for a year. Within a week, he had found a job with the State Comptroller’s Office for six months. He then found three more jobs - with the newly formed National Labor Court; as a legal apprentice to the Labor Ministry; and as a teaching assistant in the Tel Aviv University faculty of labor studies.
At the end of his first year his mentor, Zvi Bar-Niv, the first president of the National Labor Court, told Adler to leave public service and open a private practice to learn the ropes of the Israeli legal system. Adler did so, renting space in a private law firm and opening his own office.
His Hebrew was still not very good, and he was not sure he would make it. However, his wife, Ruth, encouraged him to give it a try. At the end of his first year, he decided to stay another year. Then another year. Slowly, he became convinced that he could support his family and decided to stay.
By 1975, Adler began thinking about joining the labor court. Bar-Niv backed his application. In the meantime, his Hebrew had improved, but he still had trouble writing and speaking. He was 35 when he was appointed, thus becoming the youngest judge to have been appointed to the bench. He was slated to go to Tel Aviv but ended up in Jerusalem. Just as Adler was due to take up his new position, the sole labor court judge in Jerusalem suffered a heart attack and Adler was ordered to replace him. He remained there for seven years.
During those years, he showed the first signs of the mediating skills that were to hold him in such good stead at the epitome of his career. “I was able to understand how both sides think,” he said.
Adler then served three years as president of the Tel Aviv District Court and was appointed to the National Labor Court in Jerusalem. In 1997, he became its president.
Two essential principles guided his actions during the following years. One was the need to protect the weak workers in the private sector who were no longer unionized.
The other was to avoid the traumas and economic losses caused by national strikes, a phenomenon that developed after Amir Peretz was elected Histadrut chairman in 1995.
Thus began the era of the mega-work disputes that Adler had to confront.
Although I met with Adler in his office for only two hours, I was immediately struck by his approachability and the disarming way he has of breaking down barriers and making one feel comfortable. His lack of airs does not mean that he is naïve. Neither he nor any of the personalities who had entered his chambers to hammer out agreements were looking for friendship. Each was out to maximize his own interest. But Adler realized that the antagonists were sufficiently evenly matched that no one wanted to go beyond the brink. “All” it took was a mediator who could prod them toward a solution in which each obtained something and no one felt humiliated.
Adler was that man.
He gave up his position as court president three months before mandatory retirement so that his successor, Nili Arad, could qualify for the job. Had Adler completed his term, he would have passed the age of 67 and, by law, she could not have succeeded him.
Since his retirement in November, Adler still has three months to complete writing the rulings on cases he heard. To continue writing, he has switched rooms with the new president and sits in an office bereft of the trappings of power that surrounded him for so long. It doesn’t bother him at all, he said.
He is a down-to-earth man, but he has a certain impishness.
When a Post photographer came to take pictures of him, he was wearing a cheerful red print tie. He knew he should replace it with the somber black tie that judges and lawyers wear while on duty. He even had one in his cupboard. But he thought better of it and left the room, his colorful tie clashing with his dark suit and black lawyer’s robe. The first sign of a new life.
Here are some excerpts from the interview with Judge Steve Adler:
When did you realize you had a special talent for mediation?
I found that out in Jerusalem when I first became a judge. The second judge’s son was working for the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Many of the strikes were there, so I had to deal with them and I discovered that I had a big talent for it. I think the reason for this was my background at the labor relations school in Cornell and in the trade unions in America. They gave me an understanding of the way union people work and the way management people think. What complemented that were the lay judges. The management and lay union judges would fill me in on how union and management people in Israel think.
What is the difference between labor relations in the US and in Israel?
The Americans think everything is a war. The American system is based on the employers and unions seeing themselves as adversaries. They don’t want to cooperate; they try to get as much as they can. The employers can dismiss a worker at will and give him 10 minutes to leave the place of work. And the unions, too, will be very militant.
Whereas in Israel, there is more of a willingness to cooperate. The background is a more social democratic one, where the workers had more rights and management was more willing to cooperate with them. After the initial dispute, there was more of a willingness to compromise.
How did the mediation process for the mega-work disputes begin?
One afternoon, we knew there was going to be a strike the next day over a dispute between the Histadrut and the government. The government didn’t ask for an injunction, but the manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce did. Since the strike was going to begin the next day, we held the hearing that night. And for the first time, the heads of the economy all came to the court – the head of industry, the head of the Histadrut and the head of the Treasury, and we suddenly became a platform for airing the main issues involved in these big disputes.
And instead of hearing the legal claims, which were all in writing anyway, we heard the main parts of the dispute.
After a few hours of hearing these people, I asked the minister and the head of the Histadrut to come to the chambers, and a few hours later they reached an agreement, and that became more or less a standard for settling these mega-strikes and disputes... Between 1997 and 2006, I sat all night with such people as [Binyamin] Netanyahu, [Yaakov] Neeman, Amir Peretz, Ofer Eini, [Ronnie] Bar-On and Yuli Tamir.
What is the role of the labor court in Israel’s modern economy?
Since Israel became part of the globalized economy... a big gap has developed between those belonging to the modern, Western economy and that part where people have low wages, poor educational opportunity, are taken advantage of by the employers, have poor social benefits and have a difficult time establishing themselves as far as housing and health care... The labor court has the role of making sure that the low end of the economy will at least achieve the rights that the law gives them.
The other role of the labor court is to try to set norms that will let this part of the economy and these people try to better their situation. This is very difficult, since the labor court doesn’t make the laws or the social benefits. However, in many instances when the law was not clear, the labor court was able to tip the balance in favor of these people to give them a better chance of succeeding...
The labor courts have tried to make procedures easier and to have judgments that protect these kinds of workers in accordance with the law.