The Price of Eggs: The New Power Brokers in the Likud are Unions-Turned-Special Interests
(by Rotem Oreg-Kalisky, founder and director of LIBRAEL; all views are his own)
Israel needs strong unions.
Workers deserve decent wages, collective bargaining, and the ability to defend themselves against powerful employers. For decades organized labor has played an important role in building Israel’s workforce, infrastructure, and economy, and in protecting working people, especially those who are struggling.
But there is a point at which legitimate worker power becomes partisan political power, used to protect narrow interests at the expense of the broad public interest. While historically associated with the left, in recent years this phenomenon has become increasingly visible inside the Likud.
Consider what happened at Ben-Gurion Airport this month: A sudden strike created chaos for tens of thousands of passengers and inflicted an estimated $10 million in economic damage. This highlighted the extraordinary power of Airports Authority workers and their 30-year-long union chairman, Pinchas Idan, a longtime Likud member and a significant force within the party. Following the chaos, Netanyahu "instructed" that he be removed from the Likud, but, as with many other cases in which the prime minister has "instructed" something, that is far from certain.
Then there is Israel Aerospace Industries. Its workers' union has long been one of the most influential organized blocs in the Likud, with union chair Yair Katz having inherited the position from his father, Chaim Katz, who is holding multiple ministerial positions but is perhaps best known for being the chair of the "Center of the Likud," the party's decision-making body.
The farmers' lobby offers another example. Israel's egg industry remains governed by an outdated system of production quotas that restricts who can produce and market eggs, how many they can produce, and at what price they can sell them. A reform intended to decrease regulation, increase competition, and modernize the sector has repeatedly been delayed and diluted. In 2025, the Knesset Economy Committee advanced legislation postponing the dismantling of this planning system, making the price of eggs in Israel 44% higher than the OECD average.
And then there are taxi drivers. In 2025, Transportation Minister Miri Regev announced that Uber would enter Israel, and the taxi drivers' union responded with threats to punish her in the Likud primaries. 2026 is coming to a close, with no Uber entrance in sight, but Regev won - again - a top position on the Likud's Knesset list.
None of this means that unions are inherently bad. Quite the opposite: workers should have collective power, and not every sector in Israel should aspire to be like the union-free high-tech industry. The problem begins when that power becomes "Shalter Power", the ability to shut down essential infrastructure such as airports (especially in Israel, where almost no one uses land or naval crossings to enter or leave the country), obstruct needed reforms, or mobilize thousands of primary voters - and when politicians become more afraid of organized blocs than of the millions of citizens who are not organized at all.
This is especially dangerous in the Likud, where primaries give organized groups disproportionate influence over who becomes a candidate: politicians protect special interests, special interests mobilize their members, and politicians become even more dependent on them.
Israel does not need weaker workers. It needs stronger competition (including among unions) and a political system capable of telling every organized interest the same thing: your rights matter, but so do everyone else's.
When a union becomes a political machine, it stops being merely a defender of workers and becomes another special interest - and when special interests capture politics, ordinary Israelis ultimately pay the price.
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