A Few Minutes with…Eitan Regev: Boosting Chareidi Employment

Many Israelis either unfamiliar with or hostile to the chareidi world endlessly point to the community’s low workforce participation rates, mainly among chareidi men and how that eventually will spell doom and gloom for the economy as the chareidi population grows. But what the doomsayers often fail to grasp is that underemployment — or unemployment — is not always a matter of personal choice. Sometimes it’s due to a lack of choices. In a recent interview with Dr. Eitan Regev, the vice president of data and research for the Haredi Institute for Public Affairs, he detailed many impediments to higher chareidi employment that the next government must work on. His ideas are even more relevant now, since chareidi parties will be in charge of the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs, which oversees job training and employment opportunities.

Dr. Regev is a leading data scientist, with specific expertise in the chareidi economy. A former research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and senior researcher at the Taub Center, he earned a PhD in economics from Hebrew University. He has also served as an economist in several government offices, including the Ministry of Health’s budget division. His research encompasses many fields, including labor productivity, optimal taxation, vocational training, and higher education.

There is a big gap in earnings between chareidi and non-chareidi families. It’s at least NIS 9,000 per month, on average. Is there a way to level the playing field in a market economy?

There are some objective obstacles that stem from differences in human capital [the economic value of a worker’s experience and skills], but to focus only on that is to miss a lot of opportunities to remove other obstacles in a way that chareidi society could support.

For example, we’ve discovered that the inability of chareidi women to commute to jobs dramatically influences their ability to earn higher wages. About one-third of chareidi women work close to home or walk to work. That limits their search radius for finding appropriate work that corresponds to their training. Finding new ways to enable chareidi women to work in hybrid employment, by commuting to a more distant workplace two or three times a week and working from home the other days, would greatly increase the probability of their working in a profession that fully takes advantage of their training.

Where do you see this hardship manifest itself the most?

In Beit Shemesh, we see chareidi women who are unable to commute outside the city. The employment opportunities within the city are very limited and don’t necessarily correlate to their training. So most of the opportunities within the city are low-wage jobs. Vocational training institutes were not even willing to open up shop in Beit Shemesh. Some talented women are looking to work and want to fulfill their earnings potential, but because of their relative geographical isolation, it is hard for them to do so.

Beit Shemesh is a big city now. Why can’t it offer this?

One of the solutions that we advocated for the Beit Shemesh municipality was to try to attract more high-paying employers from outside the city who would be willing to accept hybrid employment schemes for chareidi women. If they are not willing to locate an office in Beit Shemesh, at least they might agree to let those women work from home or from workspaces in Beit Shemesh three days a week and suffice with having them coming to their main branches, say in Raanana or Givatayim, the other two days. The post-Covid era opened the opportunity for such employment models.