The Island Edge of America

Chapter 4 Prewar Change

Chapter 4 Prewar Change If the sugar industry and the Big Five corporations could have seen further into the future, they might have opted for institutionalizing their relationships with the mostly Japanese leadership of the 1920 strike through collective bargaining. Had they done so, it seems plausible they could have benefited from the willingness of immigrants to work hard and get ahead. A Japanese-led system of collective bargaining might have evolved that included Filipino workers as well as the small number of Koreans and Chinese . By resisting the strikers, the companies delayed the organization of labor. This eventually left them face to face with labor radicals who for a time thought not only of gaining greater benefits from the system but revolutionizing it. While plantation strikes recurred, the focus of labor activity shifted from the fields to the waterfront. The transitional figure was a handsome young Japanese American named Jack Kawano, who was in some respects an inheritor of the locally based traditions developed in the 1909 and 1920 strikes. Kawano was born on the Big Island and worked on its plantations, then moved to Honolulu, where he worked as a stevedore. On the waterfront Kawano joined a fledgling chapter of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). Animated by the possibilities of union organization, he began to question the companies and voice grievances. He was fired often, then blacklisted. Thereafter he lived for years in a shack, trying to build up the ILA. With the economic depression of 1929, conditions on the waterfront worsened. While it often has been said that America’s prolonged depression did not affect Hawai‘i as it did many places, this observation refers to the relative market stability of plantation agriculture and ignores the plight of unorganized working people. The writer Sanford Zalburg’s description of 37 the Honolulu waterfront in the early 1930s reveals another reality—a crowd of men gathering every morning, hoping to get a day’s work. A company man would look over the crowd, where men would “mill around, yelling, shouting, kicking, punching, trying to attract attention.” The company man would pick the day’s work gang out of the crowd, and the rest would be turned away. This scene reflected the fact that Hawai‘i had a bloated working class resulting from the annexation of a large native population, the importations of Asian immigrants, and the barriers erected by the 1907 Gentleman ’s Agreement with Japan—which prohibited immigrant relocation to more lucrative mainland labor markets. Kawano estimated that half of the longshoremen were native Hawaiians. Most of the remaining half, Kawano believed, were Japanese. To recruit a worker into the union, Kawano would knock on the man’s door after work and present his case for the union. The worker who agreed to join would pay a month’s dues. Because there was no collective bargaining agreement, there was no system of dues checkoff from the company payrolls. The next month, the new member would forget to pay. Kawano would recall: “By the time you signed up this bunch, that bunch quit.”1 When Kawano saw longshoremen coming down the street, they would cross to the other side, then call out, “Hi, Jack.” Kawano would begin anew, knocking on doors. Sailors off the ships told him about the improved wages and working conditions on the West Coast and about the radical union leader, Harry Bridges. Kawano pleaded repeatedly with Bridges to send money for an organizing drive in Hawai‘i, but Bridges was battling the old-line leadership of the ILA and begged off by saying he already was spread too thin. In 1938, a strike began with inland boatmen and spread to Kawano’s longshoremen, then to metal tradesmen. On the Big Island, in the port of Hilo, longshoremen attempted to block the unloading of “hot”—or nonunion—cargo. The police wounded fifty people with buckshot. After that Bert Nakano, a union man in Hilo, walked with a limp. It was for events such as this that a report of the National Labor Relations Board described Hawai‘i in the 1930s as a “picture of fascism” and its people “more slaves than free.” While Kawano waged his lonely struggle, he was at first influenced then joined by Caucasian union men who nursed ideas of creating a class-based rather than ethnically based labor movement in Hawai‘i. Their arrival coincided with the congressional passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, which created a framework for the...