The Tel Aviv Labor Court found that Hot Mobile had unlawfully

tried to prevent its workers from unionizing.

Wireless telecommunications company Hot Mobile will pay the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor in Israel) NIS 1 million compensation, after taking a series of steps designed to frustrate the unionization of the company’s employees. Among other things, Hot Mobile sought to dismiss three of the five members of the employees’ executive committee, because of the unionization moves, Tel Aviv District Labor Court judge Neta Ruth and the public representatives on the court found in a ruling on the collective dispute between the two sides. The penalty is the largest ever imposed on a company in Israel for infringement of the right of employees to form a union.

The court also found that hasty steps taken by Hot Mobile, which has 500 employees, to restructure the company and transfer the field sales workers to sister company Hot Telecom, were also designed to prevent unionization.

The Labor Court thus accepted the Histadrut’s demand that Hot Mobile should be recognized as a separate bargaining entity for the purposes of unionization. As a result, the Histadrut was determined to be the representative workers’ organization at Hot Mobile, since more than one third of the company’s employees had signed Histadrut membership forms.

The court said that only a significant financial penalty would deter and eliminate the phenomenon of unlawful interference by employers in unionization by their employees with the aim of damaging and frustrating it. “The appropriate sum of compensation in the extraordinary and extreme circumstances of the case has to be one million shekels,” the court found.

Hot Mobile is owned by Altice Group of France.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 28, 2014