Government agencies, including the United States Employment Service, are offenders against President Roosevelt’s Executive order declaring against racial or other types of discrimination in war work, it was alleged today by the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination.
The council announced that it had investigated, or was investigating, complaints concerning “various branches of the War Department,” the Mare Island Navy Yard, the United States Employment Service, Federal housing projects and such war work organizations as the Red Cross, United Service Organizations and the Civilian Defense Council.
The report asserted that “in the main, employers who have been confronted with allegations of discrimination have been quick to affirm the policy enunciated in the President’s Executive order, and in the majority of cases have altered practices which offended that policy. Among instances of employer discrimination was one in which a company was charged with refusing to employ a woman “simply because she was Jewish.”
Declaring that it was a “strange quirk of our democratic government that among the most serious offenders in the field of discrimination are some government agencies themselves,” the report attributed this, in the main, to the fact that the practices of those agencies reflected, and were in a large measure determined by “the practices which are present in the private and business worlds.”
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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.
