Proposed Law: Kollel Avreichim will be considered Working Men

MK Uri Maklev (UTJ) has proposed a law that would consider avreichim, and academy students, to be working men. At least for certain purposes.

According to the current law, an employee is granted 8 sick leave days per year for children who get sick, but that is conditional on the employee's spouse also being a working person and declaring they were working that day. They dont want people taking a family vacation and logging 8 days as sick days. As well, if the employee's spouse is a housewife or house husband, there is no reason to grant the employee the day off, if the stay-at-home-spouse can deal with the sick child.

Maklev says that the families of avreichim have been discriminated until now in this sense. They are not considered working men, so the working wife did not qualify for the 8 sick days per year. Meaning, the child is sick and his or her mother cannot take the day off of work to care for the child or to take him or her to the doctor. the father also cannot as he earns a kollel stipend and it is often dependent upon attendance records. and if he does because he earns less money anyway, his studies are disrupted, along with some of his pay being docked (in many cases).

The proposal passed through the Ministerial Legislative Committee after winning the approval of a committee of employers. Initially they had opposed it pointing to the high costs that would be absorbed by employers, but eventually MK Moshe Gafni somehow won them over.
source: Kikar

When I studied finances in university, they spoke about a method from John Maynard Keynes how governments can combat unemployment, by which they would hire people to dig ditches, and then hire others to fill the ditches in. Just keep finding ways to call avreichim "employed" and Israel will no longer have a underemployment or unemployment problem!

It makes more sense to me to not make the sick days dependent on a spouse but to grant 8 sick days that can be used between the two spouses over the course of the year then to grant non-working people the status of working. Then the husband and wife can between them decide which of them will take off when to care for the sick child.

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