A rich labor tradition both in agriculture and transport, Hawaii’s labor movement really broke through in the 1930s with longshore strikes. To this day, Hawaii has one of the highest unionization rates in the U.S.

‘Labor Organizes in Hawaii’ by Gavin Gay from Pacific Weekly (Carmel). Vol. 3 No. 23. December 9, 1935.

FEW nights ago, here in Honolulu, I attended a dance given by the machinists’ local of the M.F. of P. for the benefit of the Standard Oil frame-up victims in Modesto. There must have been 500 workers of all race present in a happy, orderly crowd.

At the door, a worker was selling a small mimeographed labor paper called Voice of Labor. It was going fast. The paper was solid rank and file with a lot of educational material in it–militant stuff, and good. This was Friday, and the salesman told me that the few papers he held in his hand were the last of a large batch printed on Monday.

On the floor, husky Hawaiian and Portuguese longshoremen, haoles, Filipinos, and many other nationalities of workers danced together with sailors from ships in port, all feeling the first solidarity they have known in Hawaii; organized in the face of what has been supposed to be the toughest labor opposition in the U.S.

This is the middle of November, and until August there had only been a semblance of labor organization in Honolulu. A joint labor board consisting of stragglers from a few trades–a futile thing. Now there are 900 out of the 1,100 longshoremen signed up, Honolulu and Hilo are closed ports, and labor all over the islands is looking toward the waterfront, and learning. They are buying the labor paper and reading. For opposition there is a full-blown Industrial Association, now two months old, and there have been red scares with all of the Hearstian trimmings.

It all started off with a bang. In the last days of August, three rank and file agents of the M.F. of P. arrived in Honolulu. All of them worked their way in on ships. A worker named Post represented the machinists. A man of good American stock, born in St. Louis. Another, Weisbarth, one of the Standard Oil frame-up victims in Oregon, is part Hawaiian, born in Honolulu, descendant of two generations of Inter-Island S.S. captains, and represented the sailors. Paxton, the secretary for the two organizations, and editor of Voice of Labor, is an American from Arkansas. These are the men whom the shippers, Sugar’s press, and the Industrial Association call “Communistic and foreign rabble, invaders, racketeers”. All of them have sailed in and out of Honolulu for years. They came in this time to put into force their right to operate a hiring hall as granted them under the Secretary of Labor’s arbitration agreement.

Until that time, the Seamen’s Institute had acted as the hiring agent for the shippers, many of whom are on its board. A man named Burrum was its secretary and agent. During the strike he was one of Matson’s chief scab procurers.

General conditions at the institute were bad. Seamen were getting three six-cent meals a day in return for two hours’ work. The Institute was receiving both federal and local aid. Its allotment from the United Welfare Fund for this year is $14,000.00.

On the second of September the agents opened a hiring hall. Immediately afterwards, a man standing in front of the place was unmercifully beaten by two thugs. When the thugs were arrested they said that they had made a mistake. It was Post and Weisbarth they were after, and Burrum had paid them $150.00 for the job. In police court Burrum’s case was dismissed and one of the thugs given a 30 day sentence. The other, an ex-convict, was turned loose. Burrum has since then been arrested again on a third degree conspiracy charge, but, though the case has been brought before the court several times, it is still being postponed.

The day after the beating, the seamen put a boycott on and emptied it immediately. The Boss Press Institute screamed “Reds Close Hundred Year Old Institution”.

Stories ran telling how seamen were begging on the streets and sleeping in box cars. Obvious lies since the Unions can show receipts for food and lodging which they bought for the men. Enough money was supplied by local sympathizers to make it unnecessary to wire the coast for funds. None of this money was solicited.

Although seamen have been refused FERA aid, there is no destitution among them. The I.S.U. has made the Seamen’s Institute an obsolete organization.

The man who was beaten in front of the hiring hall was the father-in-law of a young part-Hawaiian ex-longshoreman and policeman, who had already started to organize the longshoremen. The ball had started rolling.

Before the “Communistic rabble” came, the longshore wage in Honolulu was about half that of the coast, and had been for years. The standard was 50 cents an hour, and nothing extra for overtime work. Just as the organizing got going well, the stevedoring firms headlined a twenty per cent raise. It was, they said, something they had long been considering; labor’s organizing had no bearing on it.

It is worth noting here that last week Sugar did the same thing with equally loud hosannas from the press. It was a red-tape-ridden bonus that mentioned $2,500,000.00, but will give 91/2 per cent raise to men who are now getting $1.00 a day. Again labor had nothing to do with it. Anyway, the longshoremen still come to meetings and the sugar workers still read the paper.

It must be remembered that all this groundwork was done without aid from the press, with the exception of one small independent weekly, The Hawaiian Sentinel, which took a labor stand from the start.

The Voice of Labor, devoted entirely to the workers of Hawaii, is now getting out the third weekly issue.

As for the Industrial Association, I have before me their Bulletin No. 1. Its membership and its aims speak for themselves, but before going into it, I quote a few lines from the report of the Attorney General to the President of the U.S. The report is dated 1932, and says of Honolulu:

“The chief financial and industrial powers of the islands are commonly said to rest in five large companies, locally referred to as The Big Five (the five firms are listed)…The so-called Big Five have become unified and interlocked to an unusual degree, through inter-marriage and interlocking directorates, until the financial control is largely in the hands of one relatively small general business group.”

On another page:

“While such monopolized control might be objectionable (this is a quoted contention of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, the office where all the directorates of the Big Five meet) elsewhere, it is absolutely necessary in connection with the development of plantation industries in the Territory of Hawaii. Thus, such industries controlling the great question of living conditions and employment are an import- ant factor in any problem of law enforcement.”

Again:

“The Governors of the Territory have always been of the white race, and have usually been selected from the ranks of prominent business men of the Territory.”

Remember that Sugar owns shipping, and the Bulletin of “Industrial Ass.” is kid-simple. Under the names of leading citizens (the President of the organization is known as Sugar’s trouble shooter) appears this list of purposes:

(a) To promote the general welfare and elevate the civic standards of the people of the Territory of Hawaii. Seamen are refused even federal aid, Honolulu has perhaps the worst slum conditions under the U.S. flag.

 (b) To instill in the citizens of the Territory of Hawaii a high regard for the laws and the ethical principles of social, business and professional life within the Territory. This couldn’t mean to instill a high record for economic terrorism, could it?

(c) To assert a wholesome influence in the education of the people of the Territory, especially with the purpose of instilling patriotism in the youth of the land, and inculcating in the permanent and transient residents of the Territory, a keen respect for our country’s history, traditions, institutions and the law.

Take Island patriotism. If a Japanese boy, say, won’t scab on, or attack another worker, he is pro-Japanese. That might be a wholesome influence.

(d) To cooperate with other bodies carrying on a like work, and with civic bodies and departments of our government, county, territorial and national, in the preservation of our system of government.

The Big Five cooperating with themselves and trying to get the federal government, through the military intelligence, to prove that all labor papers are seditious.

(e) To use lawful means to check and eradicate Communism, Radicalism, and all attempts to embarrass, harass, or overthrow our present system of government and constitutional control.

All there is to go on here is an extra-vicious C.S. law, an anarchist publication law, an anti-picketing ordinance and a trespass law that barely gives the fired worker time to get off the grounds of his former employment. Then there is the ukulele army, or National Guard. Remember, the Governors are always picked.

(f) To gather, collect and preserve, and in a lawful manner disseminate statistics, data, knowledge and information useful in carrying out the subjects aforesaid.”

There is no law against blacklists unless an employe tries to use one. As for disseminating, the only difference between the presses that squeeze the juice from the sugar, or the truth from the news, is certainly not one of ownership.

Documents of this sort have been so popularized by Hearst that they are no longer novel enough to print in their entirety. In this one there is nothing he wouldn’t have thought of.

The whole blame (?) lies with the reds. The organizers of labor are rabble and foreign, and are destroying American institutions. This latter in the face of the fact that the head of the Seamen’s Institute is a British subject who has never shown the desire for citizenship in our land.

It is the closing paragraph of the document that makes one uncomfortable. When reading it one remembers that Weisbarth received a note telling him that if he didn’t watch his step he would find himself slipping over a sampan’s edge into the sea. The last paragraph reads:

“Please write us or telephone any fact or circumstance which you feel bears directly upon the objects of this Association, as only through close cooperation can we possibly keep informed of the many and sinister activities of those who are attempting to set up on our shores an organization and government which disregards all laws other than those of brute force.”

Further back in the Bulletin is a long paragraph eulogizing the tactics of like organizations in California.

So far, except for the mentioned incidents, there has been no terrorism. Everyone feels that it is only the lull before the storm. But labor is not waiting. It is working fast, its new press is educating the workers in boss tactics, telling them what to expect. A body of workers who have slept for so long have awakened to test “paradise”, and they have found it wanting. Even twenty per cent raises and phoney bonuses will not rock them to sleep again. They are learning that it is a big war, and that the Big Five is not as big as they, with unity, may be.

This week, Hawaii sent a petition to the Governor of Georgia in behalf of Herndon. It has voted against the loading of fascist ships. Even the lethargic joint labor board has loosened its social democratic joints and written the A.F. of L. demanding that Hawaiian longshoremen be granted a charter.

Something has gone sour on the Sugar boys. Something all the lies in the world won’t sweeten again. Labor has got together for the first time on a united racial front, and that is an experience that terror can’t erase. When workers fight now they will knew whom they are fighting. And the fight is on. The lowest paid laborers under the American flag have made a fist. Five races are the knuckles on that fist

*Italicized paragraphs are mine.

Pacific Weekly, based in Carmel, California was edited by William K. Bassett, Lincoln Steffans, and Ella Winter from late 1934. A Popular Front-era ‘fellow-traveler,’ magazine that became more of a Party press over its life. With a strong literary and arts focus, something of a West Coast ‘New Masses’, the weekly did not survive long after Steffans death in June, 1936. Though its run was short, Pacific Weekly is a rich record of left-wing 1930s writing with authors like publishing work in its pages.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/ccarm_008393/ccarm_008393_access.pdf