1,600 Israeli TV, Radio Employees End Strike

Employees of Israel’s state-owned television and radio agreed to resume broadcasts Friday after a 52-day strike, the longest in the network’s history.

The 1,600 strikers, including 900 reporters, consented to return after management said it would submit a wage dispute to an arbitration board by Dec. 15, Israel Broadcasting Authority officials said.

Contributing to the accord was a guerrilla attack Wednesday on a military base in northern Israel that killed six soldiers, the officials added.

News coverage of such events is considered an essential public service in security-conscious Israel.

After the raid, broadcasting authority director Uri Porat issued a special appeal to the employees to return and an agreement was reached in hours, authority spokeswoman Sari Timmerman said in a telephone interview.

The employees struck Oct. 7, demanding 10% wage increases. The journalists also demanded salaries equal to those of newspaper reporters who earn an average of $600 a month.

Finance Minister Moshe Nissim had refused to negotiate, fearing this would encourage other civil servants to press wage demands and would threaten the government’s anti-inflation program.

But Amram Amar, the Israel Broadcasting Authority personnel chief, told Israel’s armed forces radio--not affected by the strike--”that everything will be open to negotiation” when the arbitration panel seeks a settlement.

The only Israeli Hebrew-language broadcasts available during the strike were army radio newscasts and an experimental “second channel” on television that showed old movies and musical features.

Two public opinion surveys published this month by the Maariv and Yediot Ahronot dailies indicated that only about half of the Israelis missed television and that many filled the gap by reading more newspapers, renting video tapes or going to movie theaters.

A survey published Thursday by Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicated that 61% of 504 Jewish adults polled believed that because of the strike they lacked sufficient information about current events.