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Last fall, Plasson entered the 15-million-to-25-million-units-per-year American commercial egg market, another subset of the industry, with a new patented product that the kibbutz has been researching and testing for the past three or four years. In addition, Plasson's engineers and machinists have prepared a patented entry into the broiler market, for introduction late this year. They want to lift their share from their current one-third to the 80% they enjoy in the turkey coops. After that, they plan to develop something for the baby chicks, the last drinker market still eluding Plasson's products. Each product must be designed specifically for the size of the different types of poultry.

Kantor had understood from the chicken-cages days that the kibbutz was in markets in which the business cycle was short and merciless. Plasson was thus committed to innovation, whether it liked it or not. "Before the sales start to slump," Kantor explained to his fellow workers, who are also, remember, his investors and neighbors, "we have to find something new to produce." The market's whip hand in this instance belongs to the kibbutz's Taiwanese competitors. From the moment a new Plasson product makes a market for itself, the Taiwanese crank out a cheaper version. The quality, of course, is not always comparable.Dubrovsky tells the story of a farmer who complained to one of Diversified Import's distributors about the priciness of a Plasson item. The farmer had in his hand a familiar bright red bell which, he said, had cost him a whole lot less than what the distributor was charging for his bright red bell. The distributor thereupon endeavored to instruct the farmer in differentials of quality and price.

"Take a hammer to it," he said, pointing to the farmer's bell. The farmer did, and put a bi dent in the plastic. "Then," says Dubrovsky, "he told the guy to take a hammer to the Plasson bell. Well, that hammer bounced right back and damn near clawed the farmerhs eyes out. Since then we tell people who can't tell the difference between our products and the Taiwanese, 'Take a hammer test -- and watch out for your eyes!" Dubrovsky laughs with great gusto as he tells this story. He does not laugh when he notes that Plasson's attorneys are moving in on the Taiwanese for patent infringement in countries where Plasson has patent protection.

But there is another reason that Plasson is so relentlessly driven to innovate -- namely, Ma'agan Michael's refusal, so far, to employ outside labor. Byhiring workers from nearby towns, the kibbutz could relieve a number of problems. It could buy more machines, expand production capacity, and thereby hang on much longer to the market demand for any given product. With this lengthening of the business curve, in turn, the pressure to innovate would relax slightly.

A number of kibbutzim in Israel have, in fact, recruited labor, both Arab and Jewish, from outside the collective. Ma'agan Michael will not; voters in the General Assembly have repeatedly turned the proposal down. Everyone has his own reasons for refusing this "opportunity." For Yossi Cohen, it reminds him of a visit he made in 1963 to a plastics factory in the Bronx, just to see what they were like, these machines that Itzik Kantor proposed to bring to Ma'agan Michael. "Frankly," he recalls, "I wasn't very impressed. The manager told me that of five machines, only three were working. I asked about the others, and he told me something I couldn't believe, I couldn't understand. He said that one of the workers threw -- deliberately threw -- something into the machine to make it stop and slow down production." The tough old man pauses for effect. "That, my friend, could never happen here."

Kantor makes the same point in ideological terms. "We are now all workers and owners," he says, "union members and stockholders. This is right. With outsiders here, there would be two classes of workers, and I wouldn't want that. It would immediately result in different motivating elements for different workers." For Boaz Tamir, Kantor's son-in-law and a PhD candidate in political science and management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is a matter, almost, of domestic continuity: "Besides the problems of salaries, pensions, and all the rest of it -- problems which don't exist among ourselves -- with hired labor you wouldn't be able to count on the workers the way you can count on the person who lives next door to you, who eats dinner with you on the holidays, who takes picnics with you, and whose children go to school with your children."

Meanwhile, although the question of hired labor does continue to arise, most people at Ma'agan Michael would prefer to wait -- at whatever cost in profits and under the constant pressure to invent something new -- for the coming of robotics.

Such stands of principle notwithstanding, there are those who say that the growing wealth of the kibbutz is undermining its simplicity, the purity of its idealism. Recently, for example, the General Assembly voted to allocate funds for color TV sets for those families that wanted them.To Emanuel Klebanov, the man who manages export operations from Ma'agan Michael, this was an instance of the "extravagant demands" people are making these days, "asking for luxuries." Yossi Cohen takes a more philosophical view. "As if color could improve the garbage you see on [Israel's single, state-run] TV channel!" he says.

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