Today more than ever, in the fourth industrial revolution and in times of pandemic, education and vocational training are key elements of lifelong learning systems, which equip citizens with the knowledge, skills and competences required in certain occupations and in the labor market. Worker training, involving both employers and public authorities, is one of the most important means of providing security in working life or in the course of a career.
Thirty years ago, in 1986, a collective agreement in Bank Leumi dealt with ending the work of perforators in an Israeli bank due to new technologies. The phenomenon of replacement of labor by technology in general, in the bank sector in particular, is not new. Nonetheless, new technologies such as digitalization, robotization and artificial intelligence pose new challenges to governments, unions, corporations and employees. Moreover, in the last few decades many states have scaled down their involvement in the labor market, privatized their public job services and dramatically cut income support to the unemployed. At the same time, unions across all OECD countries have been facing a sharp decrease in memberships and have lost much of their power. These trends raise questions regarding states’ and unions’ ability to assist vulnerable workers in general, workers who are being replaced by technology more specifically. This article addresses the Israeli social response to the displacement of labor by digitalization, robotization and artificial intelligence. It studies the governmental programs, which aim to retrain or reskill workers who are being displaced by technology. After studying the governmental programs, the article will demonstrate the capacity of trade unions to address the effects of new technologies by drawing on the case study of employment policies and collective agreements in Israeli banks. I have chosen to focus on the case study of Israeli banks for several reasons. First, Israeli banks have introduced many technological changes in recent years. Second, the Israeli Supervisor of Banks encourages customers to use digital options instead of coming to the branches. Third, in recent years Israeli banks have been downsizing the number of their branches as well as the number of their employees. Fourth, in Israel the bank sector is highly unionized. In the five big Israeli banks, employment policy is regulated through collective agreements that by law are open to public scrutiny and are published on the Ministry of Labor’s website. The case study of the bank sector in Israel is therefore useful for examining unions’ and employers’ response to the introduction of new technologies. In order to study the employment policies in the bank sector in Israel – especially those that were promoted by both unions and employers – I surveyed all of the collective agreements in the five big banks in Israel since the enactment of the Collective Agreement Law in 1957, altogether 1268 collective agreements. I supplemented the research by conversations with several stakeholders as well as data from newspaper articles and governmental reports. The article proceeds as follows. Following the Introduction, Part I discusses the effects of technology changes on employment as well as the main solutions to job replacement due to technology. Part II discusses the Israeli labor market and employability policy. Part III analyzes the case study of job replacement due to technology in Israeli banks. The last Part concludes.
The idea that technological advances pose an imminent threat to the livelihoods of large numbers of workers has become so prevalent that one early candidate for the 2020 U.S. presidential election centered his entire campaign on a proposal to address the issue.1Hardly a day goes by without media articles breathlessly warning that robots and artificial intelligence will soon render many employees redundant. A natural question that arises is: how should workers, firms, policymakers, and educational institutions respond to these dire predictions? Do employees need to be retrained to acquire new skills that will enable them to adapt to changing technological circumstances and employer demands?
