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,