The Value of Hawaii: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future

Labor

labor lowell chun-hoon What does the mythical person on the street think of when she visualizes labor in Hawai‘i? Angry construction workers in hard hats and torn T-shirts brandishing picket signs and obstructing traffic? Scowling backroom bosses pounding conference room tables with angry fists? Slothful government bureaucrats coddled by antiquated civil service rules? Quite possibly all of these images leap to mind. Though perceptions like these are inevitably rooted in one’s own experience and exposure, there is a forgotten and heroic history of labor in Hawai‘i that shaped the fundamental contours of current society, and has the potential to do so again. Anyone seeking to understand modern Hawai‘i and to address its future cannot comprehend either this evolution or potential without confronting this past. To some, this may seem to be a pointless excursion into a disturbing past that best remains buried and forgotten, but to others, it is an illuminating reminder of how much Hawai‘i and the world have changed in a century and a half, and an indispensable foundation for searching for a better future. Hawai‘i’s labor history is largely described by the successive arrival of different immigrant ethnic groups as plantation labor, the consolidation of these workers into working class labor organizations, and their dramatic success in achieving greater economic security and job protection. Between 1837 and 1868, sugar industry production in Hawai‘i skyrocketed from only 4,286 lbs. to 17,127,161 lbs., creating an obvious impetus for labor recruitment. In 1852, 175 Chinese contract laborers first arrived, and earned a paltry $3.00/ month. In 1868, 153 Japanese sugar plantation workers commenced working on contracts paying $4.00/month. Koreans first arrived in 1903, and in 1907, the first 15 Filipino workers, or sakadas, were assigned to Ola‘a plantation on the Big Island.1 The recruitment of agricultural labor to Hawai‘i was also a part of a broader movement of workers from Asia to the American West. These new migrants were first welcomed in California and the West Coast as a source of cheap labor. 62 The Value of Hawai‘i Chinese workers constituted a full one-half of California’s farm labor by 1884. In the post–Civil War South, some entrepreneurs saw Chinese workers as replacements for freed black slaves. In 1869, the Lexington Observer and Reporter proclaimed that with the coming of the Chinese, “the tune . . . will not be ‘forty acres and a mule,’ but ‘work nigger or starve.’”2 But the hospitality found in the editorial pages rapidly evaporated, leading to a period of episodic violence, racist stereotyping, and exclusionary legislation first against the Chinese, but later against other Asian immigrants. Various restrictive legislation followed, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first U.S. legislation to exclude any ethnic group by nationality, with modifications and extensions in 1888, 1891, 1902, and 1924. Concern over inroads made by Japanese into California agriculture, where crops they produced eventually were valued at $67 million dollars, or 10 percent of the state’s total, prompted the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913, barring Japanese from ownership of land. In 1922, the Cable Act stripped any American woman who married an Asian immigrant of U.S. citizenship, and in the same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Ozawa case that naturalization laws did not apply to Asians. By 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act excluded Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Asian Indian, and Filipino immigration to the U.S. In this national climate of exclusion, parallel incidents of labor violence and protests occurred in Hawai‘i. At least in the eyes of some, Asian labor was merely a commodity that fulfilled economic need and was virtually devoid of human qualities. A representative of the Hawai‘i Sugar Planters Association testified before Congress in 1910 that “the Asiatic has had only an economic value in the social equation. So far as the institutions, laws, customs, and language of the permanent population go, his presence is no more felt than is that of the cattle on the ranges.”3 These dehumanizing and condescending attitudes did not remain unchallenged . In 1909, seven thousand sugar plantation workers struck, and protested the racial hierarchies imposed by the plantations.“Is it not a matter of simple justice and moral duty,” they asked, “to give [the] same wages and same treatment to laborers of equal efficiency, irrespective of race, color, creed, nationality or previous conditions of service...