Instances of “Jews being rejected and discharged from employment are sharply on the increase, and hotel and resort literature is filled with discrimination specifications,” the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League reported yesterday at a meeting of delegates from eighteen national and local organizations organized in the New York Metropolitan Council on fair Employment Practice.
Reports by various organizations in the Council, which includes Protestant, Catholic, Negro, interfaith, interracial and labor groups as well as Jewish bodies, outlined methods evolved for dealing with manifestations of discrimination in employment. Several of the reports pointed out that discrimination by employers was in the upgrade in anticipation of the closing of the national Fair Employment Practice Committee office in Washington at the end of this month.
Among the participating groups were the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Jewish Peoples Committee.
The Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, which has previously been charged in the State Legislature with discrimination in hiring of Jews, was yesterday accused of hiring only one Jew within the last ten years. In a letter to Miss Mary Dillon, President of the company and president of the New York City Board of Education, the American Jewish Congress asserted that the number of Jews employed by the utility was less than three percent. This state of affairs, the letter said, “can scarcely be regarded as an accident in a company employing several hundred persons and operating in a city more than one-fourth of whose inhabitants are Jewish.”
Replying to the American Jewish Congress, Miss Dillon issued a statement reading: “Your generalized and unsupported charges that this company has had a policy or has been engaged in a practice of discrimination in employment against any qualified employee on account of race, creed, color or national origin is wholly untrue and is all the more reckless since no effort has been made by any representative of your organization to ascertain the facts from any officer of this company or any responsible person handling employment for the company. I have forwarded your letter to the chairman of the State Commission Against Discrimination and requested him to make an impartial investigation of the facts, which I am sure will demonstrate the lack of any basis for your accusations against this company or against me personally as its president.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
