Class Action (Nazareth) 53201-10-20 Mary Nicole Meir – Clalit Health Services

Before:

The Honorable Judge Revital Turner

Public Representative (Employees) Ms. Noga Botansky

Decision on a motion to certify a class action

1. We have before us a motion to certify a class action on the grounds of wage discrimination between two groups of operating room workers with the Respondent.

Factual Background

2. The Respondent is a health fund that operates 14 hospitals, including Carmel Hospital in Haifa. The wage conditions of the respondent's employees are mostly regulated by collective agreements and arrangements.  The doctors are organized through the Israel Medical Association, and the rest of the workers are organized through the new General Histadrut.
3. Hospital departments employ workers called auxiliary forces. This file deals with auxiliary personnel employed in the operating rooms in two positions, the main of which is the cleaning of the operating room and the transportation of patients to and from the operating room.  The role of transportation is performed in all hospitals only by male workers, who are called 'sanitizers'.  The role of cleaning operating rooms in all hospitals is usually performed by female employees (according to the Respondent's data, only men are employed in this position at Beilinson Hospital), and they are referred to as 'auxiliary force'.  We will also use these two terms in the context of the discussion, even though in the coupons the two groups are referred to jointly as auxiliary force workers.  The Applicant refers to the two groups as 'girls' and 'boys', a term that is common from time to time in the department, but we have chosen to use the terms 'sanitaries' and 'auxiliary force workers' for convenience and without this indicating the content of the roles or the distinction between them.  We will discuss the nature of the roles at length below.
4. The Applicant began her work at Carmel Hospital in 1992, and during the period relevant to the procedure she worked as an auxiliary worker in the operating room department.
5. In hospitals, the operating rooms operate 24 hours a day, and in some of them, planned surgeries are performed in the afternoon, and they are known as "shortening queues." Employees are assigned to the cut-off surgeries starting at about 15:00 after the end of the regular shift, including doctors, anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians, sanitary workers and auxiliary workers. The group of auxiliary force workers in the various hospitals shortly after the application was submitted numbered about 40 employees.
6. While the salary of the janitors and auxiliary workers for the regular shift (morning, evening or night) is a monthly salary (according to the set of collective agreements that apply to the respondent), the remuneration for the work of the Respondent is determined according to the type of surgery, and varies from surgery to surgery. The payment for the work of the Compensation Allowance appears on the slip, detailing the type of surgery, the number of surgeries by type, and the total amount for these surgeries.
7. There is no dispute that, as a rule, the remuneration paid to a senator for each allotment surgery is higher than the payment paid to an auxiliary worker. For example, according to data from Carmel Hospital for 2021:

Type of analysis           Sanitary                                   Auxiliary Force     Type of analysis                             Sanitary              Auxiliary Force