Six Thousand Workers in Big Lodz Textile Factory Lose Employment: Owner Famous Jewish Industrialist

About six thousand workers employed at the great textile factory in Widzew, near Lodz,. which is owned by the big Jewish industrialist Oscar Kohn (he was last week elected as one of the representatives of Polish Jewry on the non-Zionist section of the Jewish Agency Council) have been given notice of dismissal, it being explained to them that the factory is to be closed down.

The liquidators of a big Italian firm named Sigmat, which has gone bankrupt, are pressing for the immediate payment of a huge sum of money owing for raw materials supplied to the factory in order to wind up the affairs of the firm, Mr. Kohn explains, and if he pays out all this money, there will be nothing left to carry on his factory.

The Minister of Trade has appealed to Mr. Kohn to withdraw his notices, and Mr. Kohn has said that he is willing to do so if the Government will guarantee the amount owing to the Italian firm, so that the liquidators should not press for payment, and thus enable him to continue his business. The Government has replied that it cannot do this, however, and the notices therefore stand.

A few years ago, during a look-out at the factory, a worker who had been employed there shot at and killed Mr. Oscar Kohn’s son, who had been the manager of the factory.

Recently Mr. Kohn was the centre of a controversy on account of a move that was made (last February) to introduce the system of factory shops near their factories, where the workers would be compelled to make their purchases, part of the wages being paid out to them in that way instead of in cash, on the lines of the system which was abolished in England by the Truck Acts. Mr. Oscar Kohn, who employs in his factory at Widzew almost the entire population, was the first to introduce the system, much to the dissatisfaction of the Jewish shopkeepers, scores of whom lost their customers in that way, and also to the expressed dissatisfaction of most of the workers.