CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 ILWU. Fiercely dedicated to the fight for social and workplace justice, she has given nearly the last 60 years of her life in service to union members, to students, to the terminally ill who wish to die with dignity, to the community at large.
Since my talking with you in the 2000 Convention, 9/11 occurred, redefining our country’s role in world politics, with its dangers to democracy. For the first few minutes, let’s shoot the breeze in order to lay the background for more serious discussion of the future role of this Local in particular and the labor movement in general.
What is important as you participate in your deliberations of this convention is to try to translate the occurrences of the past and how they affect your behavior as union members and as participants in the life of the state.
Like many of your parents and grandparents, my generation were children of the depression and perhaps the first generation representing the largest cohort of American citizens born to immigrant parents.
I remember picking kiawe beans and dried bones for sale to the fertilizer company in Iwilei where the family lived; walking to school because there was not enough money for car fare; pushing my kid brother ahead of me at the old Palama Theatre because I had only enough money to buy one ticket. At least the both of us had the chance to see our favorite cowboys, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, beat the crooks.
I remember working during summers in the pineapple canneries beginning at the age of 13. At first it was Libby McNeill & Libby on Kalani Street bordering Waiakamilo Road. We’d rouge ourselves, wear high heels, and waved our arms wildly in a shape-up outside the cannery iron gate. Yes, the shape-up similar to the shape-up in the early days of longshoring. In that way, the manager would notice us and pick us out of the crowd for a job that paid 12-1/2 cents an hour.
Many of my generation worked while in college when tuition was only $50 a semester and second hand books could be bought for a few dollars.
Campus jobs paid 25 cents per hour in the National Youth Administration—a federal program.
During my senior year, I had five jobs going, with a total monthly income of about $38.00; I also cleared tables at the school cafeteria for a free lunch. Incidentally, one of your longshore officers, Yukio Abe, now long retired, used to wash the big pots and pans so he too could get a free lunch, the same time I cleared tables.
Working for money to pay for tuition, fees, and books and to augment the family income was not unique to me. Many of my classmates—children of sugar and pineapple workers and small merchants—worked at even harder jobs than I, cutting cane, plucking coffee beans, picking pineapples and other jobs that required manual labor.
Very few of our children or grandchildren work in the fields and canneries today, if only because there are only two sugar plantations left and two pineapple companies still doing business. Instead, the youngsters now work in fast food establishments, in the retail trades, doubling as advisors in camps run by non-profit organizations, and babysitting.
UH and Unions
I remember when the president of the University of Hawaii would not allow a women’s group of which I was chair to use a campus classroom because we had invited a member of the International Typographical Union to discuss the effects of the National Labor Relations Act, on Hawaiian workers. The speaker was Marshal McEuen, the local’s first political action director in 1944.
I remember when members of the ROTC and the football team pelted about 50 of us with tomatoes and eggs when we peace marched in 1936 from the gate on University Avenue inscribed with the motto, Above All Nations Is Humanity.
We had our peace demonstrations even as early as the 30s and we were condemned for demonstrating for peace.
Past and future
The coming of Captain James Cook to Hawaii in 1778 changed the whole complexion of the Hawaiian communal system. Cook’s arrival opened up the island kingdom to the world, with its wonders and its diseases.
In rapid succession natives became seamen and day workers; sandalwood, no longer the monopoly of the king, became a money crop for chiefs; whaling ships stopped in Hawaii for supplies and altered the whole nature of work; the first plantation on Kauai enhanced the alteration; the gold strike of 1848 brought further changes by increasing job opportunities and encouraging economic development.
The coming of the missionaries with religious and business goals in 1820 was followed by the Mahele of 1848 which made land a commodity, a necessity for the business men who saw sugar as a crop that would bring them riches. But because there were not enough Hawaiian men to do the work on plantations, the Masters & Servants Act of 1850 was enacted to allow importation of workers with 3 to 5 year contracts—$3.00 monthly pay and augmented by the penal code covering the violation of contracts signed by laborers.
The original group of about 175 Chinese men was followed by importations of nearly 400,000 from the rest of the world up to the mid 1930s. In between the importations, there were the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 offering tariff-less export of Hawaiian sugar and which linked Pearl Harbor to the U.S. defense system to ensure its dominant role in the Pacific; and the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1882 and the denunciations of the American Federation of Labor who saw the importation of foreign labor as a threat to its power and perceived right to high paying jobs in Hawaii.
The last large importation of 6,000 Filipino workers occurred between January and June, 1946 under a special arrangement with the Department of Interior to take care of the shortage of labor caused by World War II, even though under martial law all workers in the territory were frozen to their jobs and their wages. Incidentally, all these workers while at sea were signed up in the ILWU by union organizers through an arrangement the ILWU made with the Marine Cooks & Stewards Union.
Early workers
Let’s take a look at what our great grandparents, grandparents and parents did in those earlier years of working under the Masters & Servants Act.
Before the Act, the first strike occurred on Kauai in July, 1841 at what was then known as the Koloa Sugar Co.
That year Hawaiian workers struck because the daily 12-1/2 cents they earned was paid in scrip and could only be redeemed at the company store. They wanted to be paid 25 cents a day in cash. That strike was lost, as were many others, under the guise that Hawaiian workers were the highest paid agricultural workers in the world— an assertion repeated many times since 1841. The Hawaiian workers were characterized in this way by management: “The Hawaiian can lie down and die the easiest of any people with whom I am acquainted.” Shades of epithets against other ethnic workers as the yellow peril and troublemakers.
Your ancestors were segregated into ethnic camps, the exact reason for such segregation not manifestly important except to say that they served a purpose in preserving identity of the groups, but made it difficult for all workers to compare their working conditions. At a later period segregated camps provided the clue for successful organization by the ILWU through the identification of leaders of camps who were recruited as organizers.
Your ancestors, cognizant of discrimination in job assignment and wages among the various ethnic groups, conducted many strikes; some small; others big. Examples: 1909: mainly Oahu Japanese sugar workers, but supported by neighbor island Japanese workers; 1920: FilipinoJapanese coalition strike with the first demands for maternity benefits and other women’s issues; wholesale eviction of workers and death from the influenza epidemic; 1924: Kauai Filipino Strike when 18 rank and filers and police were killed; 1937: Filipino workers strike Hawaiian Commercial Sugar Co. with legal help from the mainland-based International Labor Defense; last big ethnic strike whence came Calixto (Carl) Damaso, the second president of ILWU Local 142; 1938: Inland Boatmen’s Union strike against InterIsland Steamship Navigation Co., culminating in the August 1 Hilo Massacre when organized workers and their families gathered on the Hilo dock were attacked by the police; 1940: strike of Kauai longshore workers, resulting in massive evictions from plantation homes—workers from Lihue Plantation were offered [to remain] as sugar workers with homes or as longshoremen without homes—in the longest recorded Hawaiian strike; reflected for the first time collaboration of all ethnic groups.
During this period Jack Hall, your first regional director appointed by the International Union in 1944, organized two locals of United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing & Allied Workers of America at Kauai Pineapple Co. and McBryde Sugar Co. Hall formed the Kauai Progressive
—continued on pages 4 and 5