I’ve been in the Middle East for the past week meeting with Israeli journalists (today I’ll be sitting down with Arab journalists in Nazareth). The wonders of the free market have infected labor relations here, too. It used to be that Israeli journalists were paid via a collective agreement that was set through the semi-government process of setting all salaries throughout the market. That worked fine—no one got particularly rich, but everyone had a fair shake, particularly when it came to preserving their jobs.

In the 1980s, in an effort to emulate the media star system in the U.S., the major media companies here (a number of whom belong to the public broadcasting system here) began signing up high-visibility journalists for salaries negotiated on an individual basis.

That caught on. The Israeli journalist unions did not make much of an issue of it back then but it has now come back to bite them—bit time. As part of the more conservative government’s embrace of “free market” ideology (pursued aggressively by Benjamin Netanyahu, the current finance minister and once, and he hopes, future prime minister…his peace with Ariel Sharon will last until Netanyahu can find a way to slit Sharon’s political throat), virtually all media journalist contract as now individual. Collective bargaining has collapsed—only about 60 journalists nationwide are covered by collective agreements, a top Israeli union official told me the other night.

They are searching for a way to turn the situation around. But, it’s going to be tough—not the least of their problems is that Israeli journalists have shrugged their shoulders and feel that they have no recourse.