About three thousand Jewish weavers in the big textile city of Lodz who have been accustomed to working on hand-looms are in a desperate position without any prospect of ever obtaining employment in the present crisis, the Secretary of the Textile Workers’ Trade Union declared at a meeting held at the hall of the Jewish Artisans’ Federation in Lodz, attended by the workers employed in 45 power-loom factories, employing 5,400 workers, of whom 304 are Jewish, with another 280 Jewish women employed in auxiliary occupations in the factories.
The outlook for the Jewish hand-loom weavers is quite hopeless, he declared, and the only way out for them is to get them into the power-loom factories. The Textile Workers’ Trade Union, therefore, he said, appeals to the weavers who are working in the power-loom factories to make an effort to get as many hand-loom weavers into the power-loom factories as possible.
Jewish textile workers in Lodz were until the last year or two employed exclusively on the hand-looms. The first attempts made in 1928 by some of the big Jewish mill-owners to introduce several Jewish workers into their power-loom factories were met by a strike on the part of the Christian workers who had held a monopoly of the work on the power-looms.
The first strike occurred at the factory of the Jewish mill-owner Eitingon, who had engaged a pupil of the O.R.T. classes trained to work on the power-looms, and a second broke out a few days after at the mills owned by the Jewish textile manufacturer Schmuliwicz.
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.
