Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (review)

In Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement, Moon-kie Jung presents a nuanced theoretical explanation of how racially diverse workers in Hawai'i, after decades of failure, dramatically joined together as a unified class following World War II. The rush of tens of thousands of workers into the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) between 1944 and 1946 was an immensely significant event that ushered in the startling transformation of Hawai'i from one of the most politically rightwing parts of the U.S. to one of the most progressive. In both popular understandings of and scholarly research on Hawaii's unique labor movement, race has long been considered an obstacle to the successful class mobilization of workers against their powerful employers. While sugar planters joined forces as a class starting in the 1870s, workers, with the exception of a fleeting coalition between Japanese and Filipino strikers in 1920, failed to do the same. To explain the belated postwar rise of labor, a broad range of researchers from proponents of Robert Park's assimilation paradigm to Marxist sociologists and historians proposed that race faded over time as a significant organizing factor in workers' identities. In contrast, Jung explains that interracialism, or "the ideology and practice of forming a political community across extant racial boundaries," results from the attachment of new meanings to workers' persistent and deeply felt racial identities (3). Jung provides a useful analysis of an important phenomenon that he points out has been broadly valorized, but under-studied.

Jung clearly explains that for decades, workers failed to organize themselves as a class against their highly organized employers because they did not see their material interests or histories as shared across racial lines.¹ Portuguese, Japanese, and Filipino² workers faced differential access to jobs, housing, and wages on sugar plantations while they also identified themselves as racially distinct based on affiliations with their ethnic countries of origin. Jung conveys this well by explaining that workers faced "qualitatively different racisms," and as a consequence were "differentially enabled and constrained" from participating in labor organizing (8, 61, 185). Japanese workers stayed out of the labor movement after 1920 because of intense anti-Japanese racism mobilized under aggressive Americanization campaigns . Portuguese workers, hoping to be accepted as "white," refrained from challenging the haole elite and distanced themselves from other groups.³ Filipinos, ostracized by all, combined their nascent anti-colonial nationalism with labor militancy and continuously organized (98–105).

By 1937, support from West Coast unions and the extension of New Deal labor laws to Hawai'i ended planters' unmitigated power. Martial law, however, paralyzed the labor movement during much of WWII, but also helped later to galvanize disgruntled workers into unions. The passage of the "Little Wagner Act" in 1945, and the collapse of anti-Japanese racism given their heavy wartime sacrifices helped the ILWU, as an interracial organization, secure industry-wide contracts by 1946 (167). Crucial to this triumph were democratic institutional accommodations such as affirmative action in union elections, multilingual meetings, and translated publications as well as a narrative of "divide and rule"⁴ that rearticulated race as the basis for new working class alliances (161).

Jung's analysis of the divide and rule thesis as a discursive strategy is particularly insightful. Workers often attribute their organizing successes to their belated recognition of "real" class similarities that had been obscured by planters wishing to divide them racially. Jung agrees that planters played a preponderant role in structuring the materiality of racial inequality and in heightening racial antagonisms, while he disagrees both that planters created racisms solely from above and that their reification of race was enough to cause divisions among workers.

Jung's recognition that local and international frames of reference shaped both employers' and worker's racial ideas is another strength. He isolates this recognition, however, to the pre-WWII period, when he should extend it to show the impact...