Summary
The Haifa club opened by the Histadrut in July 1925, run by Avraham Khalfon and Philip Hassun, as its first vehicle for organising Arab workers outside the railways — organiser of the October 1925 carpenters’ and tailors’ strike, virtually moribund by 1927 and closed sometime in 1928 or 1929 (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 992-998, 1008-1012, 1076).
Details
- The club, in a busy, largely Christian Arab section of Haifa’s old city, offered evening classes in Hebrew and Arabic literacy, lectures by members of left-wing Zionist parties and Arabic newspapers, and access for some workers to a vocational training course at the Technion; its chief mission was labour organising, through new unions for tailors and carpenters (line 992).
- The October 1925 strike it led, of some 100 carpenters and some thirty tailors, won after two weeks a nine-hour workday, a half-hour lunch break and seven paid sick days a year, in negotiations hosted by Al-Karmil’s editor Najib Nassar (lines 996-1002).
- Its decline followed the severe economic downturn from late 1925 to 1929, Syrian craftsmen’s influx into Haifa’s building trades, and a barrage of criticism from both Arab nationalists and Jewish communists, who united in seeing it as an instrument of Zionist infiltration of the Arab working class (lines 1008-1010; Chapter 2 note 47).
- David Ben-Gurion warned Khalfon during the strike not to go too far in teaching Arab workers to strike (line 1006).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Histadrut, Avraham Khalfon, Philip Hassun, Haifa, Joint Organization