Municipality Playing Hardball with Nursery School Teachers

Recently, a friend of mine asked me about a 3-year non-compete clause his nursery teacher wife was asked by the city of Jerusalem to sign.

Last year, the Knesset passed a new law providing for free nursery school education for 3 and 4 year olds (see article here.)  In order to immediately implement this law, the city asked local nursery teachers who already had private classes in their apartments if they wanted to fill the positions available for the city nurseries. Many of these women already had established reputations in their neighborhoods. Now, they could go to work for the city and bring their clientele with them.

My friend's wife had been running her own nursery program for a few years and applied for a position and was accepted. She recruited children for the class but had not yet signed a contract with the city. When she received the contract, she was surprised to see that it had a 3-year non-compete clause that looked something like this:

Corporate Espionage: Spying on Your Own Employees

In a recent case, (Iskandar Salman v. Ihab Alimi) the Labor Court ruled that an accountant, who discovered that he was being filmed in his office by his employer and without his knowledge for the last 7 years, was, despite his resignation, entitled to severance pay.

The plaintiff claimed that after 11 years of working for the defendant, the last 7 of which occurred under surveillance, he no longer trusted his employer and the fact that his employer surreptitiously filmed him at work constituted a deterioration of the workplace environment such that his resignation should be considered the equivalent of a dismissal and he should thus be entitled to severance pay in respect of the years of service to the employer. The Severance Pay Law- 1963 states that "Where an employee resigns by reasons of an appreciable deterioration of his conditions of employment, or in view of other matters of labor relations affecting him and because of which he cannot be expected to continue in his employment, the resignation shall, for the purposes of this Law, be deemed to be dismissal."

The plaintiff also sued for emotional distress caused by the invasion of privacy. (In case you are curious, the plaintiff learned of the existence of the camera after the employer returned from his vacation, viewed tapes of the other employees not performing their assigned tasks properly- whatever that means- and called them into his office to reprimand them. It was then that the secret filming was revealed. The employer claimed this was the first time he had ever reviewed the tapes.)