A funeral service will be held Thursday for Jacob S. Potofsky, former president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a top official in the AFLCIO. He died yesterday at his Manhattan home at the age of 84.
Born in Radomisl in the Ukraine on Nov. 16, 1894, his family emigrated to Chicago when he was 11. He went to work at 14 as a $3-a-week floor boy at Hart, Schaffner and Marx. As a teenage member of Pontsmaker Local 144, he joined a strike in 1910 led by Sidney Hillman. The strike eventually led to the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the beginning of Potofsky’s long association with Hillman.
In 1913, Potofsky became a fulltime union office manager and after several other positions he came to New York in 1916 to assist Hillman in opening the national headquarters for the union which covered workers in the men’s clothing industry. Potofsky was assistant general secretary treasurer for 20 years until becoming assistant president, a post he held from 1934 to 1940. He was general secretary treasurer from 1940 to 1946, when Hillman died and he became president.
Potofsky, who was known as one of the diplomats of the labor union movement, was one of the last survivors of the group of Jews from East Europe who helped built the American labor movement in the first half of the 20th Century.
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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.
