Cause of death: Globalization, weak dollar, human decency

He was 48 years old, according to the brief items that appeared in the Hebrew press late last week (here , and here ). Yossi Danziger was the director-general of Polgat, a producer of wool fabric in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat. He died of a heart attack, shortly after the company did. He’d been trying to find alternative jobs for the 300 workers who lost their jobs when Polgat’s owner, the Bagir firm, decided to cut its losses and shut down the factory, apparently without great success .

Polgat, according to the news reports, couldn’t match the low production costs of Far Eastern competitors – especially when energy prices were soaring and the value of the dollar was shrinking daily. Most of the company’s export contracts were in dollars. Old-timers here recall a time when the dollar was considered a strong world currency and when using it for international contracts made sense.

As for labor costs, the news items did not detail how the Far Eastern competitors keep them down. We are supposed to accept the idea of garments and fabric and everything else being produced more cheaply in far away places where there are no safety protections for workers, no environmental standards, no social benefits, where it is accepted for workers to live in dickensonian conditions.

In Israel, we are also expected to accept that a factory in an outlying town must be able to compete on the world market and make a profit. At a different time in Israeli history, the government regarded full employment as a top political and human priority. Many of the factories were owned by the government or other public bodies, like the Histadrut labor union. If they weren’t profitable, they were less costly than having towns full of unemployed people, and less costly than letting those towns die. Old-timers here remember this time, far back in another century, when “socialism” wasn’t a dirty word.

Now Israel is supposedly thriving as a high-tech country. But as I wrote in an earlier post , the growth is all in the Republic of Tel Aviv, where high-tech and the financial sectors are concentrated. Places like Kiryat Gat can only survive if some of the high-tech wealth is taxed and used to support them financially and to improve education drastically so that the children of the textile workers can move into the new economy.

Danziger’s death made the news because he was the manager of the company, and because he died young and suddenly and immediately after his company died. The crumbling of 300 workers’ families and of the town will not receive such coverage. Danziger, to judge by the news reports, did think about such things, and died of it.