Jack Hall and the Origins of the ILWU in Hawaii, 1934-1966
Edited by Harvey Schwartz
Hall first saw the Hawaiian Islands as a young sailor in 1932. He made Honolulu his home base three years later while still a working seafarer. Soon he began organizing and writing for the militant Voice of Labor newspaper in Hawaii. As a member of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), Hall aided Hawaii’s longshore workers early on. After the SUP and the ILWU became estranged in mid-1937, he moved closer to the ILWU. Soon he was organizing plantation workers into a new CIO affiliate that had ILWU backing.
By early 1938 Hall was the editor of the Voice and was a well-known Islands activist. That year he was kicked out of the SUP, was beaten by a Honolulu detective, and heard all about the infamous “Hilo Massacre” in which police injured 51 strike supporters. Still, Hall kept organizing, and the drives he worked on in the late 1930s set the stage for the ILWU’s great success in Hawaii at the end of the war.
Union organizing in Hawaii was suppressed when the Islands came under military rule after the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941. Early in the war the military flatly refused to recognize even the most basic union rights. But in spring 1944, with martial law relaxing, Hall was appointed ILWU regional director for Hawaii. He presided as the ILWU unionized more than 20,000 plantation workers during 1944-1946 in one of the most dramatic organizing campaigns in American history.
Hall was regional director for 25 years as the ILWU united Hawaii’s diverse work groups—Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Native Hawaiians—into one cohesive force. In earlier years, unions organized along national lines had routinely failed. This time things would be different.
Under Hall’s guidance the ILWU also became a fixture in Hawaiian politics, overturned Hawaii’s feudal “company island” social and economic system, and developed great bargaining strength in the sugar, pineapple, and tourist industries. His work in the Islands complete, Hall became an ILWU International vice-president in 1969. Sadly, he died in office at the beginning of 1971 when he was only 55 years old.
The interview excerpted here was conducted in 1966 by Edward D. Beechert, the founding director of the Pacific Regional Oral History Program at the University of Hawaii (UH). In 1985 Beechert published “Working in Hawaii: A Labor History.” It remains the definitive book in its field. We are greatly indebted to Beechert, today professor emeritus from UH, for taping Hall long ago and for releasing the transcript now for use as the basis of this article.
Hall’s overview of the ILWU’s emergence in Hawaii begins with his recollections of the early struggles for unionism in the mid-1930s.
Jack Hall
Many Hawaiian seamen were involved in the 1934 strike, which I happened to get into starting around Bloody Thursday, July 5. That was the day I hit San Francisco, coming up from Los Angeles. My ship tied up in LA and did not go on to San Francisco, so I went up by bus. I got there in time for all the excitement. The strike continued after July 5 and the Hawaiians were involved in large numbers. They ran almost as a group in San Francisco and were considered the toughest gang of guys on the waterfront when it came to going after scabs—“strike breakers” as they call them politely.
Matson Navigation Company’s schedules in the 1930s were such that a ship coming to Hawaii from the West Coast would hit Honolulu, then make every outport and come back to Honolulu, generally before going back to the Coast. So it was quite common for people to get off in Honolulu and be replaced by others who had just continued to work around the islands. Of course, these people had local contacts and the story of the 1934 strike was being spread. In some Hawaiian ports wages for longshoremen were as low as 28 cents an hour before the waterfront in the Islands was organized after the strike. The Hilo longshore group included in those early days many Hawaiians and others who had gone to sea on Matson ships and were quite militant. They began the first efforts toward organization and were successful in 1935—after a series of job action strikes—in getting recognition from the company at Hilo and in getting some form of a contract.
It was not a very good contract, but at least it established some load limits that were comparable to West Coast load limits. These remained unchanged in Hilo until the 1960s. So Hilo as a group of longshoremen were always the most militant. I’ve always considered them as the guys that really started the modern day labor movement in Hawaii.
In most other areas people were frightened. This was particularly true in the ports on Kauai which were run at Nawiliwili, Ahukini and Port Allen and over at Kahului on Maui. There were no real efforts at organization in Kahului until after, or toward the end of World War II when military controls on labor went off and all the other ports were organized. There were many outstanding leaders, but many of the rank and file were taken in by company paternalism. For example, even in the days at McCabe, Hamilton and Renny Stevedoring Company in Honolulu, when the guys were only making five and ten dollars a week, I remember Jack Guard, the manager, making sure that when anybody was broke, they could come up and get five or ten dollars to feed the family.
It took three elections to get representation rights there. But the Hilo group on the contrary, I think primarily because of a close affinity to the seamen and so many of them being ex-seamen, had a militancy that was uncharacteristic of the rest of the Hawaiians.
Organizers came from Hilo to Honolulu in 1935 to assist the people in Honolulu that were trying to unionize. Guys like Harry Kamoku, Pat Ikeda, and a couple of others came up at the expense of the Hilo longshoremen. It was five dollars in steerage on Inter-Island steamer then.
I first came to Honolulu to stay in 1935. It’s been my home base ever since I returned there from a trip to Port Allen after the 1936-37 maritime strike. When we had that strike, the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP) leaders on the mainland wanted us to bring the ships back, but I held up the Lurline in Honolulu. I was SUP sailors’ delegate aboard. I said, “Who wants to be in San Francisco in November and December?” So we ended up with 12 ships tied up, including the Lurline, and about 1,100 seamen on the beach.
This had a tremendous impact on the community in Honolulu. Strike headquarters was at the old St. Louis College down on College Walk that Bishop Alencastre had made available. So we had all the facilities there and people were able to get by. We had a lot of quiet support from the community.
After the ’36-37 strike I made one round trip to the coast on the old Maui, came into Honolulu, and found out that Port Allen had walked out. The whole port was shut down. The longshoremen called the SUP hall to see if they could get some help in setting up a union now that they were all on strike.
I was available, and Maxie Weisbarth, the SUP agent, asked me if I’d go to Port Allen. So I went over and in a few days we were able to get the thing resolved with recognition and an initial contract. That contract wasn’t much by today’s standards, but it did recognize the Port Allen Waterfront Workers’ Association.
ORGANIZING THE PLANTATIONS
The modern-day effort to unionize Hawaii’s plantation workers began in March and April 1937 when Filipino labor leader Antonio Fagel, together with a number of close associates, one of whom was Carl Damaso, made efforts to organize the people on the island of Maui on a nationalist basis. They came to the SUP and asked for help, so a couple of us went over and joined them in street rallies. There were some tremendous crowds with tremendous enthusiasm. We were, of course, trying to get them to move toward a multi-racial union.
There were a number of people, particularly among the older Japanese, that were supporting the Filipino unionists, giving money through people they could trust. That organizing effort ultimately ended up in a strike. Lots of criminal charges were brought up. Although the strike was settled with a temporary victory in terms of wages, they didn’t have the organizational structure to continue and a lot of people were blacklisted and arrested. Some of the strike leaders sold out. But there was such a demand for organization among these people that word got out throughout the Islands.
The first real success in plantation organization came on Kauai later in 1937. It was an outgrowth of the organization of the longshoremen there, who had a close association particularly with workers at McBryde Sugar Company. They all had the same employer. This time the Japanese took control of the organizational efforts, although one of the very active Filipinos, Mauro Andaya, was the president over there.
We set this up as a CIO organization, Local 76 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO). We organized everybody, mill workers and all. At one point McBryde had almost 2,000 employees and we had most of them signed up. Workers at the adjoining Kauai Pineapple Company were brought in soon. There Dick Bell, who was the manager, recognized the union.
At McBryde we had to go to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to get recognition. Old John Waterhouse at McBryde wasn’t about to recognize any union if he could get away with it. Len Wills, who was then head of the NLRB here, suggested we file just for those people that were clearly covered by the National Labor Relations Act. So we did file for a very narrow unit and a unit much narrower than the board finally handed down in the elections held at the tail end of World War II. We won that McBryde election in 1940 and eventually got a contract at least recognizing the union and its right to handle grievances, have some protection against discrimination, and get some measure of job security. Not much more.
That was the beginning, and from McBryde we branched off into the adjoining plantations, Olokele and Kekaha to the west and Koloa and Lihue toward the east. The movement spread out primarily because the union was well-established in the McBryde and Kauai Pine and Port Allen areas and had already become a political force. So we were riding high by 1940.
People with time on their hands and not much else to do really worked hard to organize. We used to go right into the camps, even though they had trespass laws, and defy them to throw us out. Sometimes they would take you out, but we went back in. Actually, I haven’t been subjected to any violence since before the war, but there was a hell of a lot of it then. There were two occasions when they were out to knock me off on Kauai that have been confirmed by informed sources.
By 1941 we thought we were strong enough to win an election at Kekaha and lost it by a handful of votes. We had considerable organization developing at Koloa, and by developing, I don’t mean just signing people up. We used to have lots of meetings and lots of interest. Meetings used to go on for five and six hours. In those days they had to be conducted in three and sometimes four languages, including two Filipino ones. You had to have discussion in Japanese and Ilocano, in English for the younger workers, and sometimes still in Visayan.
On the Big Island we didn’t do anything until we started this big drive at the tail end of ‘43. I was working for the Territorial Department of Labor then. But we consulted and the longshoremen in Honolulu donated 5,000 bucks out of their treasury and put on a task force to go to work down there, because you could feel it coming. People wanted to organize. They were very resentful of the wartime labor controls. So this group of longshoremen went down there and started flying all over the island, barging into mills and shops, looking for contacts. There was some damage because they were saying all you had to do is join the ILWU and you get longshore wages. We corrected that later on.
Finally the ILWU International sent Matt Meehan down here. Matt had been secretary-treasurer of the union in the ‘30s. He had known of me and we spent some time together. When he left he appointed me the regional director for the Islands. I started work in 1944. They also sent down Frank Thompson, who had been with Lou Goldblatt in many organizational campaigns in the West in timber and mining when Lou was secretary-treasurer of the California CIO (1938-1942). When Frank and I were given adequate funds we just went step by step methodically. Didn’t take long before we signed them all.
I think Olaa plantation on the Big Island was the first place to get complete organization. But we weren’t concentrating on any one plantation. Initially the concentration was on the Big Island, although there’d been movement toward organization on Maui and Kauai, where our pre-war beginnings had been eroded by military rule. Olaa went very fast. They had a cohesive group of young people, what they called the Surfriders. These young guys, like Saburo Fujisaki, put that one into shape first.
By the time the NLRB got into the picture to hold hearings we had every plantation on the Big Island except Waiakea Sugar, where the company had signed a back door deal with the AFL covering the mill workers. Of course, we went ahead and organized the field workers.
SWEET VICTORY IN ’46 STRIKE
In the big 1946 Hawaii-wide sugar strike we had meager resources, but the people had meager resources when they were working, too. In fact, in the ’46 strike many people were doing better than they lived normally. Many had had a very low diet in an attempt to save a little money. During the strike, there was a communal type of living. The first plantation communities here were ideally constructed for that. So when everybody was eating the same, some of their living standards slightly improved.
We, of course, enforced multi-racial leadership, irrespective of abilities, which bothered some people, but you can’t survive without multi-racial leadership. We had everybody in the leadership in one fashion or another, and everybody felt a part of it. The employers didn’t think we would survive, but I don’t think they knew their own people.
When the employers saw they couldn’t break the ’46 strike some of them wanted to fold. C. Brewer and Company, one of Hawaii’s “Big Five” corporations, was hurting so bad they forced a settlement. It went far beyond the original demands in economic gains. After that they figured, “Let’s see, change the complexion of Congress, develop the Cold War and McCarthyism.” Perhaps they could break the union on a red-baiting campaign.
They began to hammer away and find every renegade they could. The 1947 so-called Ignacio Revolt on the Big Island—a red-baiting attempt to split the union—was directly financed by the employers. We know that from people that were on the inside and later broke from them, like Jacinto Conol, who gave us information about what was going on. We made out a program with Hilo that everybody was going to vote on and threw all our forces into getting down to the rank and file. When the vote was over, we were still in business.
In 1951 I was indicted under the Smith Act. The charge was advocating subversion. I think all these attacks just strengthened the union. Now, there’s a tremendous loyalty in the union for the leadership. I don’t think they like everything, but they know what’s happened. Nobody’s going to get taken in by that sort of thing in this union in Hawaii anymore. It’s historical fact made clear to every new member through the education program for leadership and union participation. So we have a tremendous ability when we go into negotiations. We don’t have to look behind our shoulders to make sure the troops are there. We know they are.