Evidence of the existence of wide-spread and growing employment discrimination against Negroes, Jews, and other minority groups was presented to a House Labor subcommittee today by Irving Kane, chairman of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, national coordinating body for the major Jewish organizations.
Kane told the subcommittee, holding hearings on a bill to create a federal fair employment practices commission, that this legislation should get first priority in the civil rights program, “No other right is so fundamental as the right to work,” he said, “for the right to work is in our economic order the right to survive as an independent, self-respecting person. And to this right all other rights are subordinate; without this right, no other right has meaning or purpose.”
Rabbi Eli E. Pilchik, representing the Synagogue Council of America, also registered his support of fair employment practices legislation in testimony before the subcommittee. He told the subcommittee that an increasing number of discriminatory practices are noted as unemployment increases. He pointed out that all religious denominations have gone on record for a program which would curb discrimination.
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