About three thousand Jewish weavers in the big textile city of Lodz who have been accustomed to working on hand-looms are in a desperate position without any prospect of ever obtaining employment in the present crisis, the Secretary of the Textile Workers’ Trade Union declared at a meeting held at the hall of the Jewish Artisans’ Federation in Lodz, attended by the workers employed in 45 power-loom factories, employing 5,400 workers, of whom 304 are Jewish, with another 280 Jewish women employed in auxiliary occupations in the factories.
The outlook for the Jewish hand-loom weavers is quite hopeless, he declared, and the only way out for them is to get them into the power-loom factories. The Textile Workers’ Trade Union, therefore, he said, appeals to the weavers who are working in the power-loom factories to make an effort to get as many hand-loom weavers into the power-loom factories as possible.
Jewish textile workers in Lodz were until the last year or two employed exclusively on the hand-looms. The first attempts made in 1928 by some of the big Jewish mill-owners to introduce several Jewish workers into their power-loom factories were met by a strike on the part of the Christian workers who had held a monopoly of the work on the power-looms.
The first strike occurred at the factory of the Jewish mill-owner Eitingon, who had engaged a pupil of the O.R.T. classes trained to work on the power-looms, and a second broke out a few days after at the mills owned by the Jewish textile manufacturer Schmuliwicz.
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