October 26, 2006
I went to the military hospital at Mare Island in Vallejo, Calif., had surgery and was put on out-patient treatment for a few months. I kept in close touch with the ILWU International office in San Francisco and took some courses in labor economics at UC Berkeley.
As soon as I got out of the military service, I went to work for the International as a participant and guide for a labor education program that was set up for a group of people from the Islands. The International officers paid lots of attention to the program, and it got full cooperation from the California Labor School, which was then a strong educational institution in San Francisco. We’d go down to the Labor School for lectures and discussions. We also took in membership meetings, negotiating sessions and other union-related happenings.
After the fellows from Hawaii left, I stayed on the International staff working for the research department for a couple of months. Then, in June 1946, I went to Honolulu. My new title was research director. We moved into headquarters at Pier 11 right after I arrived.
At Pier 11 we painted signs on all the little cubicles we had for various activities. Everybody was a director, including the janitor. He was called the director of sanitation. I worked under the title research director until 1947. Following the pineapple strike that year, we went over to the Big Island of Hawaii. Then I became the International representative.
The ’47 pineapple strike was a fiasco. We lost Islands-wide bargaining and didn’t get it back for four years. Something had to be done to correct the weaknesses that had become apparent. We started out by trying to develop rank-and-file understanding of the need for solidarity on a territory-wide basis and solidarity between industrial groupings. [Hawaii was still a U.S. territory then. It did not become a state until 1959].
The problem was that the pineapple workers had not been properly prepared for a strike or lockout. Most of the attention of the union had gone into the sugar and longshore workers and, unfortunately as well, pineapple had been organized late.
We called the pineapple beef a “lockout” because it was brought on as part of an employer design that was against the wishes and the intention of the union. We were bargaining for a settlement and thought we were very close to an agreement, but the employers stalled while the strike deadline passed. By then our guys were setting up picket lines. We found ourselves in the midst of a strike we didn’t want. We walked into a trap.
There were lots of seasonal pineapple workers who had no solidarity with the union. They were encouraged by the employers to cross our picket lines and they did. As our weakness showed up, we called in the entire territorial leadership from all the industries and raised the perspective of saving the pineapple strike by fighting on all fronts. But the sugar leaders said they couldn’t do this because their members would not understand why they should support a strike in another industry.
The lesson of this was that we had to get closer to our rank and file and show them that the only way to do any big thing was on a consolidated, territory-wide basis. We were even hoping to convince our members to back consolidating our various early locals into one strong territory-wide local. That goal was achieved with the emergence of consolidated Local 142 five years later.
The Hawaiian contingent at the labor education program hosted by the ILWU International in 1946. Thompson was a participant and a facilitator. This was his first job with the ILWU after recovering from wounds he sustained at the WWII battle at Iwo Jima. Standing (left to right) Elias Domingo , Leocadi baldovia, Thomas Yagi. Seated (left to right) K.K. Kam, Yoshikazu Morimoto, Dave Thompson (with cane), harry Kamoku, Webb Ideue, ILWU International President J.R. (Bob) Roberston. Dispatcher file photo.
So, considering all of this, after the ’47 pineapple beef was settled, we made a drive on the Big Island, with its thousands of sugar workers, to set up steward systems and get in better touch with the membership. I worked with Bob McElrath and a few others in conducting the steward classes we held.
At the same time, we pushed a campaign on the Big Island about enrolling people in the union’s new dues check-off program, which was supposed to make dues payment automatic. Unfortunately it wasn’t carried out very successfully. Clearly, there was much work to be done.
The period from 1948 to 1951 was one of consolidation and rebuilding on the Big Island. There was the set-back of the ’47 pine strike to overcome. And damage had been done by the “Ignacio Revolt,” which was a red-baiting movement led by Amos Ignacio, a former Big Island ILWU officer. In 1947-1948 Ignacio tried to split the ILWU. He wanted to set up an independent union.
At an important meeting in Hilo on the Big Island in December 1947 Ignacio announced what he was going to do. There was a heated exchange. I was among those who pointed out that what Ignacio was doing was wrong and that it would be disastrous for the workers.
One of the first things I did was call Lou Goldblatt in San Francisco to tell him what was happening. Lou came through like a champion. He said that the way to handle this sort of thing was to leave it up to the rank and file by setting up a territory-wide delegate convention, which is exactly what we did. I went to work immediately lining up people to attend. We had a convention in Hilo right after New Year’s in 1948 and the delegates voted overwhelmingly to stay with the ILWU.
In part I think Ignacio’s plan was rejected because there was a real salting of observant and reflective veterans of the industrial history of Hawaii among our ranks. We had Japanese and Filipino guys that understood what had happened in earlier labor struggles when Hawaii’s racial unions didn’t work. They knew that the only way they could have a union, the only way they could stand up to the powerful Big Five corporations that controlled the Hawaiian economy, was to have a solid territory-wide group with connections with the mainland longshoremen.
As noted, damage was done to us by the Ignacio revolt. There’s no blinking that. It slowed us down some. Beyond Ignacio, the major 1949 longshore strike for wage parity with the mainland’s West Coast was something which split the wider community down the middle, and this was not good for us either.
Basically the ’49 strike did two things. It set the stage for tremendous gains by the union since we won. At the same time, it isolated the union from a part of the community. The employers pushed this, too. They determined that they were going to make the union an untouchable group of pariahs to everyone in Hawaii who was not ILWU.
The employers pursued this program for a long time. This didn’t come all in 1949. The split and accompanying animosity developed in 1949, but the devise of trying to characterize the union as an outlaw took form after U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings were held in Hawaii during 1950. The ILWU was mentioned often in that McCarthy era spectacle. Unfortunately for the employers, they selected a very un-Hawaiian sort of devise—that is, to say, “You can’t talk to these people and still be respectable.” It didn’t work.
I’m sure that the reason the union was able to withstand all this red-baiting, including the Smith Act trial of 1952 that targeted Jack Hall and others as individuals who supposedly wanted to overthrow the government, was because people knew each other here. You live in a neighborly sort of way in Hawaii and you just can’t tell lies about guys like Jack Hall and so many other people as was done and get away with it.
As to the impact of this sort of thing on our rank and file, well, the membership had become inured even to the state apparatus being used against the union. That had been going on a long time. For example, during the ’49 strike President Harry Truman sent a personal plea to the Hilo longshoremen to back down. I remember that very vividly because there was such a godforsaken looking little bunch of guys down on the Hilo dock the day we had a meeting to consider Truman’s request.
Pineapple workers pikceting in front of locked gates in the 1947 pineapple lockout. Dispatcher file photo.
Our guys were bare-footed. They had ragged pants. The morale committee was playing ukuleles and guitars and it was real country stuff. And here comes this message from the president of the United States, who had never even heard of the longshoremen in Hilo before. Boy, those guys dumped that request by a real solid vote.
That vote was a wonderful thing to see, because the guys had figured out for themselves that there wasn’t anybody in government that knew what was good for them as well as they did. They believed this rank-and-file stuff we’d been preaching all these years.
When Jack and six others known as the Hawaii Seven were tried under the Smith Act in ’52, we got all the union support we needed. Our members assumed that the goal of the trial was to destroy the union’s leadership and the union. A great job was done of developing a defense committee, which then went directly to the rank and file.
Sabu Fujisaki, one of our officers, was appointed defense committee head. He immediately got the thing set up on the basis of mass-participation in each community. You’d schedule a dinner, a picnic or a mass-meeting, and you’d get as many community leaders as possible to come in and take a position on behalf of the defendants.
This went on from 1952 until the convictions of Jack and the others, which came down the next year, were reversed in 1958. Thousands of people came into contact with the defendants through our defense activities. We brought in great numbers of witnesses from the various ILWU units. They’d sit in on the trial to watch what happened. We published a running story of the trial, too. So one result of the Hawaii Seven indictment was that it made for an intense rank-and-file participation in the life of the union.
I went to the military hospital at Mare Island in Vallejo, Calif., had surgery and was put on out-patient treatment for a few months. I kept in close touch with the ILWU International office in San Francisco and took some courses in labor economics at UC Berkeley.
As soon as I got out of the military service, I went to work for the International as a participant and guide for a labor education program that was set up for a group of people from the Islands. The International officers paid lots of attention to the program, and it got full cooperation from the California Labor School, which was then a strong educational institution in San Francisco. We’d go down to the Labor School for lectures and discussions. We also took in membership meetings, negotiating sessions and other union-related happenings.
After the fellows from Hawaii left, I stayed on the International staff working for the research department for a couple of months. Then, in June 1946, I went to Honolulu. My new title was research director. We moved into headquarters at Pier 11 right after I arrived.
At Pier 11 we painted signs on all the little cubicles we had for various activities. Everybody was a director, including the janitor. He was called the director of sanitation. I worked under the title research director until 1947. Following the pineapple strike that year, we went over to the Big Island of Hawaii. Then I became the International representative.
The ’47 pineapple strike was a fiasco. We lost Islands-wide bargaining and didn’t get it back for four years. Something had to be done to correct the weaknesses that had become apparent. We started out by trying to develop rank-and-file understanding of the need for solidarity on a territory-wide basis and solidarity between industrial groupings. [Hawaii was still a U.S. territory then. It did not become a state until 1959].
The problem was that the pineapple workers had not been properly prepared for a strike or lockout. Most of the attention of the union had gone into the sugar and longshore workers and, unfortunately as well, pineapple had been organized late.
We called the pineapple beef a “lockout” because it was brought on as part of an employer design that was against the wishes and the intention of the union. We were bargaining for a settlement and thought we were very close to an agreement, but the employers stalled while the strike deadline passed. By then our guys were setting up picket lines. We found ourselves in the midst of a strike we didn’t want. We walked into a trap.
There were lots of seasonal pineapple workers who had no solidarity with the union. They were encouraged by the employers to cross our picket lines and they did. As our weakness showed up, we called in the entire territorial leadership from all the industries and raised the perspective of saving the pineapple strike by fighting on all fronts. But the sugar leaders said they couldn’t do this because their members would not understand why they should support a strike in another industry.
The lesson of this was that we had to get closer to our rank and file and show them that the only way to do any big thing was on a consolidated, territory-wide basis. We were even hoping to convince our members to back consolidating our various early locals into one strong territory-wide local. That goal was achieved with the emergence of consolidated Local 142 five years later.
So, considering all of this, after the ’47 pineapple beef was settled, we made a drive on the Big Island, with its thousands of sugar workers, to set up steward systems and get in better touch with the membership. I worked with Bob McElrath and a few others in conducting the steward classes we held.
At the same time, we pushed a campaign on the Big Island about enrolling people in the union’s new dues check-off program, which was supposed to make dues payment automatic. Unfortunately it wasn’t carried out very successfully. Clearly, there was much work to be done.
The period from 1948 to 1951 was one of consolidation and rebuilding on the Big Island. There was the set-back of the ’47 pine strike to overcome. And damage had been done by the “Ignacio Revolt,” which was a red-baiting movement led by Amos Ignacio, a former Big Island ILWU officer. In 1947-1948 Ignacio tried to split the ILWU. He wanted to set up an independent union.
At an important meeting in Hilo on the Big Island in December 1947 Ignacio announced what he was going to do. There was a heated exchange. I was among those who pointed out that what Ignacio was doing was wrong and that it would be disastrous for the workers.
One of the first things I did was call Lou Goldblatt in San Francisco to tell him what was happening. Lou came through like a champion. He said that the way to handle this sort of thing was to leave it up to the rank and file by setting up a territory-wide delegate convention, which is exactly what we did. I went to work immediately lining up people to attend. We had a convention in Hilo right after New Year’s in 1948 and the delegates voted overwhelmingly to stay with the ILWU.
In part I think Ignacio’s plan was rejected because there was a real salting of observant and reflective veterans of the industrial history of Hawaii among our ranks. We had Japanese and Filipino guys that understood what had happened in earlier labor struggles when Hawaii’s racial unions didn’t work. They knew that the only way they could have a union, the only way they could stand up to the powerful Big Five corporations that controlled the Hawaiian economy, was to have a solid territory-wide group with connections with the mainland longshoremen.
As noted, damage was done to us by the Ignacio revolt. There’s no blinking that. It slowed us down some. Beyond Ignacio, the major 1949 longshore strike for wage parity with the mainland’s West Coast was something which split the wider community down the middle, and this was not good for us either.
Basically the ’49 strike did two things. It set the stage for tremendous gains by the union since we won. At the same time, it isolated the union from a part of the community. The employers pushed this, too. They determined that they were going to make the union an untouchable group of pariahs to everyone in Hawaii who was not ILWU.
The employers pursued this program for a long time. This didn’t come all in 1949. The split and accompanying animosity developed in 1949, but the devise of trying to characterize the union as an outlaw took form after U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings were held in Hawaii during 1950. The ILWU was mentioned often in that McCarthy era spectacle. Unfortunately for the employers, they selected a very un-Hawaiian sort of devise—that is, to say, “You can’t talk to these people and still be respectable.” It didn’t work.
I’m sure that the reason the union was able to withstand all this red-baiting, including the Smith Act trial of 1952 that targeted Jack Hall and others as individuals who supposedly wanted to overthrow the government, was because people knew each other here. You live in a neighborly sort of way in Hawaii and you just can’t tell lies about guys like Jack Hall and so many other people as was done and get away with it.
As to the impact of this sort of thing on our rank and file, well, the membership had become inured even to the state apparatus being used against the union. That had been going on a long time. For example, during the ’49 strike President Harry Truman sent a personal plea to the Hilo longshoremen to back down. I remember that very vividly because there was such a godforsaken looking little bunch of guys down on the Hilo dock the day we had a meeting to consider Truman’s request.
Our guys were bare-footed. They had ragged pants. The morale committee was playing ukuleles and guitars and it was real country stuff. And here comes this message from the president of the United States, who had never even heard of the longshoremen in Hilo before. Boy, those guys dumped that request by a real solid vote.
That vote was a wonderful thing to see, because the guys had figured out for themselves that there wasn’t anybody in government that knew what was good for them as well as they did. They believed this rank-and-file stuff we’d been preaching all these years.
When Jack and six others known as the Hawaii Seven were tried under the Smith Act in ’52, we got all the union support we needed. Our members assumed that the goal of the trial was to destroy the union’s leadership and the union. A great job was done of developing a defense committee, which then went directly to the rank and file.
Sabu Fujisaki, one of our officers, was appointed defense committee head. He immediately got the thing set up on the basis of mass-participation in each community. You’d schedule a dinner, a picnic or a mass-meeting, and you’d get as many community leaders as possible to come in and take a position on behalf of the defendants.
This went on from 1952 until the convictions of Jack and the others, which came down the next year, were reversed in 1958. Thousands of people came into contact with the defendants through our defense activities. We brought in great numbers of witnesses from the various ILWU units. They’d sit in on the trial to watch what happened. We published a running story of the trial, too. So one result of the Hawaii Seven indictment was that it made for an intense rank-and-file participation in the life of the union.
That probably wouldn’t have happened if the union had had easier sledding. During the Hawaii Seven years, I used to sell a hell of a lot more books to ILWU members on subjects like unionism, labor history and civil liberties than I do today. There were a lot of intense bull sessions and discussions then.
That whole McCarthy era experience developed leaders and members who were self-reliant morally and intellectually, which has served us in good stead in the years since. Certainly the McCarthy period had a blighting effect on the nation as a whole, but it was one form of fire that hardened the steel in our case.
In that same time frame—1952 to 1958—despite our troubles, we made some great strides. The resolution of the problem of how to protect our membership from the impact of agricultural mechanization was worked out then. The idea was to shrink the work force from the top by making it attractive for people to withdraw from a mechanizing industry.
There were wage gains as well, although the real fight over a big money increase came in 1958, when we struck the sugar industry successfully. Throughout this whole difficult period, too, despite the Hawaii Seven trial, Jack Hall’s strength as regional director was remarkable.
We were even able to develop wide community understanding of what we were fighting for during the ’58 strike. We had great strike organization after 12 or so years of unionism, and we had learned how you get things done through various political channels, how you cope with the administrative apparatus of the state and how you deal with public functionaries.
By the end of the ’58 struggle we perceived that there had been a lasting change in our relationship to the community. Finally, we felt, we’d broken out of the wall that the bigots had tried to build around us.
Since the mid-1940s, too, there has been a continuous growth in our ability to accomplish things for our membership by political methods. John Burns, who became the governor of Hawaii in 1962 with strong backing from Hall and our union, even once said that the ILWU brought democracy to the Islands. What he meant was that the union, for the first time, made it possible for independent, critical opinions to be expressed.
It used to be that there were plantations that a Democratic politician could not go into to hold a political rally. He’d have to hold it on the public road. But when the union wrote its first agreements with no discrimination for race, creed, color or political affiliation, that immediately provided a basis for people to take an open part in politics.
The first thing people did was to build a strong Democratic Party, because they regarded the Republican Party as an instrument of the employer. So for the first time you had the development of an effective two-party system in the Islands. And, of course, it was the ILWU that had made this possible.