ghetto with their load for several days, they were left inside, while military vehicles came to collect the goods and carried them outside. This occurred in November 1941.
When mass deliveries of brushes commenced, commissions went mostly to pre-war workshops that had operated in Warsaw for a long time. Over time, the boom in the brush-making business resulted in the establishment of new workshops. The fact that production was easy, even more so given [23] how standardised the commissioned products were, allowed even non-professional individuals or those with basic training to create manufacturing workshops. There were basically two types of workshops:
1 “brush factories”, equipped with a handful of drills, which could employ tens or even hundreds of people simultaneously, and
2. workshops that employed outsourced workers for the majority of work, doing mostly finishing work themselves.
In any case, the number of workshops rose steadily, and were funded by both old and casual outsourced employers.
The second division will take into account the expertise of individual workshops. In October 1941, there were about 120 workshops in the ghetto under the expert guidance of brush-makers from Warsaw or craftsmen-refugees, who employed about 500 moreor less-skilled workers. There were also about 100 opportunistic workshops, employing 1,500 only semi-skilled workers (mostly adolescents and women). The second group of workshops did only mass work, while the first group also made articles of higher quality, more specialised brushes for shoes, clothes, etc.
Therefore, the brush-making industry employed about 2,000 people. Brush-making also entailed a high level of employment in mechanical carpentry workshops that made wooden parts for brushes, as well as wire manufactures.
Wages in brush-making were relatively low because entrepreneurs and workshop owners hired young, untrained and—most importantly—unemployed people who were desperate for any income; as such, they were vulnerable to exploitation. Despite these circumstanced, as a result of a number of conflicts workers managed to adjust their wages to standards more or less reflecting living conditions. Rates were different depending on piecework. In autumn 1941, they were paid 5.50 zlotys for a dozen brushes. Since an average worker could make least 2.5 dozen brushes a day (in mass production), their
