Two Korean-born founding members of I.W.W. Local No. 1. are caught in an explosion working on an irrigation ditch at the Paia Plantation on Maui. Fellow Worker Yee Ryal Choon was killed and Yee Soon Moon seriously injured.

‘Fellow Worker Killed in Hawaii Explosion’ from Industrial Worker. Vol. 4 No. 50. March 6, 1913.

In Moui Territory Hawaii, on February 7, while working at the head of an irrigation tunnel for the Paia Plantation Co., Fellow Worker Yee Ryal Choon was blown to pieces and Fellow Worker Yee Soon Moon was seriously injured by a dynamite explosion. The injured fellow worker is in the hospital and is not expected to live. If he survives it will be as a helpless cripple.

The inside tunnel workers did not know of the accident until they made an investigation when the fellow workers failed to come off shift at 4 p.m. Moon was then found unconscious, covered with rock and it was learned that Choon had been blown to pieces.

Fellow Worker Yee Ryal Choon leaves a wife and two children and Fellow Worker Yee Soon Moon has a wife and two children who are destitute. Both men are Koreans, and were charter members of Local No. 1, I.W.W., Powela, the first local organized under the Hawaiian administration, and also the first local on the island of Moui.

The men were working under contract, which meant that they were forced to speed up to the highest pitch in order to earn a few more pennies for their wives and babes. No doubt they took some extraordinary risks and as a result one gave his life and the other can recover only as a cripple for life.

Contract work and piece work are things that industrial unionism will do way with and as the workers organize they must be taught to refuse to do piece work, or to take contracts.

Demand wages and work slow. The slower we work the longer the job will last and the more men the boss must hire to do the work. Had the workers been organized industrially upon this entire job the above accident would not have happened. When they organize industrially there will be no repetition of this murder by the capitalist system.

Press Committee, Powela Local, Moui, T.H.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v4n50-w206-mar-06-1913-IW.pdf