The most serious failure of the change government that is falling apart today is not raising the minimum wage.
The Knesset is dispersing today, and due to such and such disputes it has not approved the package deal, and the minimum wage will not increase.
By this step, the government is actually ignoring more than a million people who earn NIS 5,300 a month.
The minimum wage has not been updated for 5 years, while the consumer price index rose by about 6.5% during this period.
To be fair, the minimum wage should have risen immediately to NIS 5,645 just to "catch up" with inflation in the economy, but it will not rise by NIS 100 either.
When both spouses earn a minimum wage and have two children, according to Social Security data, they are within touching distance of the poverty line, or more precisely, NIS 1,600.
That is, any unplanned expense, such as spending on a summer camp or paying for surgery, will throw such a family out of financial balance, and those who will be harmed among others are their children.
Failure to raise the minimum wage widens the gaps in Israeli society.
For example, since January 2021, the average wage of those employed in the booming high-tech industry has risen by about 18% to more than NIS 30,000 a month.
While politicians are proud, and rightly so, of the macro-level economic achievements, some of them probably also need to get out of the political bubble to notice the economic hardship of the micro-level citizens, for example of those earning the minimum wage and raising rents because housing prices are rising.
Among the popular achievements that politicians have recently been proud of is the reduction of the budget deficit, which reached a level close to zero at the end of May.
But is this really good news?
In view of the wave of price increases, would it not have been better to reduce the tax burden, for example, and reduce VAT on regulated food products?
"With a zero deficit you don't go to the grocery store," a politician who supports raising the minimum wage told me.
A statement that may sound populist also expresses a simple truth: Politicians see life through a different prism, and it is often very different from what happens on the street.
Without the package deal and if the government does not initiate other moves in the matter, the minimum wage will remain unchanged until April 2023, and only then will it increase by about NIS 400 as a result of the activation of an automatic linkage mechanism to 47.5% of the average wage in the economy.
The proposal of the chairman of the Labor Committee, MK Efrat Reitan, which was discussed in the Knesset yesterday, was not far from the Finance Ministry's proposal - both in terms of amounts and in terms of vacation days and hours.
This time it was not possible to justify the opposition by saying that it was a populist proposal, but that this proposal also met with opposition from both employers and the Ministry of Finance.
Why?
Thus, for example, MK Simcha Rotman explained his opposition: "Raising the minimum wage at a time when small businesses are struggling for their lives will not lead to more welfare for employees but to layoffs and business closures," he wrote on his Twitter account.
The fear of mass layoffs and the closure of businesses as a result is probably unlikely, because the economy is in full employment and the opposite is true - many businesses fail to recruit workers, and some of them have long since decided to raise the wages they pay.
Were we wrong?
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