When Mayor LaGuardia returns to City Hall today, he is expected to receive the recommendation by Market Commissioner William Fellowes Morgan Jr. that Arthur Simon, Health Department confidential investigator in charge of kashruth, be appointed mediator in poultry market labor difficulties and special investigator into kashruth in poultry markets.
Simon has been known in poultry circles for his pronounced sympathy with the slaughterers of kosher poultry. In constant contact with rabbis and leaders of Shochtim Union Local 440, he has gained an understanding of their problems, which makes him fit, in the eyes of slaughterers and rabbis, to assume the task.
It was precisely these two factions that cornered Commissioner Morgan at City Hall last Friday, showed him the error of his speech in which he declared that slaughterers are overpaid, and then pressed their recommendation of the Simon appointment.
SIMON TO DEAL FIRMLY
If and when Simon is appointed, wholesalers will feel the pressure of a new deal which they may not enjoy. Simon has already privately indicated that he will deal firmly with such anti-labor moves on the part of wholesalers as merging markets to save on labor, especially when these moves endanger the kashruth of poultry here.
Simon feels that wholesalers’ problems—coop hire, feed charges and trucking costs—have already been aired. It is time, he thinks to give some attention to the forgotten man, the kosher slaughterer.
Slaughterers’ problems are bound up with the problems of kashruth. A speed system is repugnant to slaughterers and rabbis. Especially now is this true when Local 440 has, under pressure of a common adversary, taken in the Vaad Shochtim Oifes, formerly a bitter rival union.
MEET TO CONSOLIDATE
Local 440 has an appointment for 10:30 this morning with Aldermanic President Deutsch. This appointment was made last Thursday, the day before the City Hall victory, to protesting the statement by Morgan. But since this has been cleared up to the satisfaction of the union, it is doubtful what the slaughterers will say at City Hall if, indeed, they appear at all.
A meeting of the Local is scheduled for six o’clock tonight. This meeting, too, was arranged when the union leaders were in the throes of despair, and, had it not been for last Friday’s developments, tonight might have seen the declaration of a general slaughterers’ strike which would almost certainly have been followed by a market workers’ walkout.
But these extreme measures are believed to have been obviated, and the meeting will serve to consolidate the position of the shochtim, it is believed.
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.
