The executive committee of the Association of Federation Workers, with a membership of 800 men and and women employed in the vairous organizations within the Feberation, for the support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, will meet Monday night at the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., to work as a protest against the salaries paid by Federation, Marcel Kovarsky, presidnt of the Association announced Friday.
The decision to empower the executive of the association to arrange the stoppage was taken Thrusday night at a meeting of more than 400 members of the Association. It was also decided unanimously to send a telegram, which was a virtual ultimatum, to Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, president of the Federation borad, giving the board until five o’clock Monday evening to restore all salary cuts instiuted by the Federation during the depression and demanding also a restoration of normal salary increments in the organization which granted them until 1931.
Kovarsky, who is employed as a psychologist at the Jewish Board of Guardians, president at the meeting in the auditorium of the Stuyvesant High School. He described in detail the negotiations carried on by the association with Federation officials and the stalemate reached by the two groups. He then called upon the representatives of the various organizations in the Federation, including a group of 100 maintenance workers, elevator men, kitchen employees, hospital workers and the various social workers, to state their position on the stoppage proposed. One after another, representatives of the workers of parctically every charitable organization in the Federation rose and pledged their enthusiatic support for the stoppage. The group was apparently in a fighting mood and every declaration of support was greeted with applause by the audience. The one refusal to participate in the stoppage was greeted by a silence which contrasted strangely with the applause preceding and following this one declaration. One delegate in the autience, a director of one of the Federation institutions, declared that in the event of a stoppage, her institution would be closed completely.
When the vote was taken on an #mendment giving the Federation more time to answer the association demands, it was voted down angrily, while the vote on the motion itself vas passed unanimously with much cheering.
All Ranks Present The cultured accent’of the Harvard graduate and the colloquial English of the elevator boys, the broken English of the kitchen mechanic and the scholarly academic English of the’psychologist were all heard at the’meetjnj? pleading for unity and demanding action from their executive committee. “We once thought ‘ourselves somewhat, different from the maintenance workers,” declared one of the social workers, but we found out that we are all working for wages. Let’s stick together and achieve our aims.”
In answer to a question from one, of the members- as to what would happen to wards of theFederation during the stoppage, chairman Kov-arsky expjained that the association. has arranged for emergency staffs to; work during the stoppage and that no inmate of an institution or patient ‘in a hospital would suffer because ol^ the stoppage. His declaration was cheered by the audience.
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.
