The Worker’s Hotline in Israel: Simultaneous Subculture of Opposition and Collaboration

Abstract

This paper studies the cultural features of one organization promoting workers’ social welfare. The Worker’s Hotline challenges human rights violations by exploitive employers and the Israeli government. The Worker’s Hotline uses a variety of political strategies: collaborating with governmental agencies and fighting against the authorities, even while being funded by them. The main research question is: What is the Hotline’s defining cultural features? Can it be considered counterculture or subculture of values? The authors utilized qualitative research methods. They conducted 25 interviews; gathered documents from websites and then analyzed these interviews and documents. The findings indicated the Worker’s Hotline cultural features were primarily left-wing with socialist principles. This association’s organizational culture can be identified as a subculture, opposing dominant Israeli right-wing capitalist culture in legal spectrum. This case study’s uniqueness is its suggestion that the Hotline is a sophisticated subculture, whose activists simultaneously operate with and against the authorities.