Louis Goldblatt and the Early Days of the ILWU in Hawaii, 1943-1946

Edited by Harvey Schwartz

Louis Goldblatt

In 1943 I began to consider organizing in Hawaii beyond the waterfront jurisdiction we had in Hilo and Honolulu. I took office then as International secretary-treasurer and started going through materi­al on the back­ground of various locals. I made it my business to cover as much ground as I could.

We had gotten started in Hawaii in the organi­zation of long­shoremen, first in Hilo around 1935 and then in Honolulu. In 1938 they took a bad setback in Hilo in the Inlandboatmen’s Union (IBU) Inter-Island Steam­ship strike, with a number of people shot up and hurt. I read about the ILWU’s long waterfront strike at Port Allen in 1940 that lasted damn near ten months. It got to the point where all the workers were living under a huge tent. The union salvaged recog­nition and little else. The thing that struck me was that in no case had we really made it over the hump.

In the case of Honolulu they signed some sort of a makeshift agreement which never became truly effective because in 1941 World War II came along and that brought military rule to Hawaii. As far as the mili­tary was concerned, unions might be around, but you don’t pay any attention to them. There had been some initial organiza­tion of plantations, mostly under Jack Hall’s leadership. Still and all, we had never been able to get an effective base.

I recall doing a lot of reading on Hawaii and its closed struc­ture. Not just longshoring, but everything from land, to banking, to insurance, to factories, to supplies, to shipping was domi­nated by the Big Five corporations. One of the conclu­sions I reached was that longshoring played a different role in Hawaii than it did on the mainland. Instead of being a general industry of longshoring, in Hawaii longshoring was just a branch of the Big Five.

Jack Hall and I later had lengthy discussions. We had both reached the same conclusion, namely, that by tackling longshore first in an effort to strengthen and widen organization in Hawaii we would not succeed, even though longshore had the very direct appeal of being tied in with the same industry on the West Coast and had been organized and gotten ILWU charters in the 1930s.

Anyway, I was thoroughly convinced that Hawaii ought to be given a whirl. Initially we sent down Bill Craft, a longshoreman from Seattle, who reported that the workers wanted a union, and not just for the waterfront alone. We sent another old-timer, Matt Meehan, who had a distinguished record in Portland. He came back with a more detailed report and a positive recommendation that the individual who knew the greatest amount about the economy of Hawaii and about trade unionism and had already done a great deal of work was Jack Hall.

We hired Jack as regional director in 1944 and that’s when organization really began. For a while we were sending all of our supplies by ships through seamen we knew. We didn’t trust the mail. We opened a small storefront down off the waterfront in Honolulu. I think it was the street just before Maunakea, where the flower vendors are. That was the headquarters until we got going.

My first trip to Hawaii was in 1944. I remember going down there in the Maunakai, a big tub that carried 14,000 tons of cargo. It was awfully slow; when it did ten knots that was good. It broke down during the trip, so an extra day was lost. They had put doghouses, sort of, on the afterdeck and carried a few passen­gers. Getting plane transportation was out of the question at the time with the war still on.

That’s when I first met Jack. We hit it off well. There had been a lot of correspondence before then, back and forth, stressing the importance of trying to tackle the Big Five at their roots—that would be the land, agriculture. We agreed that the basic source of their power was sugar and pineapple. It was towards the tail end of the war and the atmosphere of military rule by then was not that tight. So we began not only the rebuilding of the longshore union but mainly going after the plantations.

Resentment had piled up around the plantations and all through the society on the manner in which manpower had been handled during the war. A number of people wanted to get out of the jobs they were doing, like laundry jobs, and go to work in Pearl Harbor where better jobs were opening up. The military had frozen people on these laundry jobs so the colonel could have his shirt washed.

That was the situation when we got going on the organi­zational push. We began putting some money in. We decided we needed a guy in the field like Frank Thompson, who was as good an organizer as this country has ever seen. He was quite a character, an old-time Wobbly (member of the militant Industrial Workers of the world, or IWW), a hardy, efficient guy with an endless amount of energy.

Frank worked well with Jack, although they didn’t see too much of each other because Frank spent so much time in the field. As soon as the initial breakthroughs began and the word went out that the union was signing up people, everybody got into the act. There was a real wave of organization.

The waterfront fell into place very quickly. There wasn’t too much of a problem there. At that point we had to do some heavy duty thinking. Do you sign up everybody? What is the purpose if you can’t follow through? The signing up itself is a very prel­iminary step toward genuine organization.

The big decision we had to make was how wide could we scatter our forces? We only had so much money and manpower. Ultimately, the conclusion we had reached did not change—namely, we wanted to make the break primarily in sugar and secondly in pineapple.

We decided that we could not repeat the mistakes made in the past. Jack and I knew a great deal about the whole background of lost racial strikes, if you want to call them that. So under no circumstances would we have a racial strike, no matter what the rate of speed in organiz­ing one group as against another. The Japanese were an active group and organized very quickly. The Filipinos were not too far behind. They would move with a lot of strength once they felt they were getting a straight and honest shake and that the union was going to do exactly what it prom­ised, or try to.

We were spending a fair amount of money organizing, but it wasn’t a lot, even for the time. I think we paid Frank $75 a week. I don’t know that Jack got much more. The whole thing was a very low paid operation. With a few orga­nizers, supplies we sent from the mainland, plus the volunteers who pitched in, I’d say that if you had to compare it to any organizing push in the history of the country, the cost of orga­nizing one worker must have been one of the lowest ever.

I remember that in 1944 Frank did something very novel. Before National Labor Rela­tions Board (NLRB) elections for union certif­ication took place, he would go to these plantations one by one and conduct a rehearsal election. He would put out a sample ballot, call a meeting, and say, “We are going to vote. Every­one gets a secret ballot.” If the vote came out, say, 695 to 4, he’d say, “Okay, there are four people we’ve got to find. They somehow got screwed up.” Well, the NLRB election results speak for them­selves. We had entire planta­tions that voted unanimously.

In the fall of 1944 they had elections for the Territorial Legislature—Hawaii didn’t become a state until 1959. Jack had always been interested in the political offshoots of the whole economic situation in Hawaii, and particularly the domina­tion of the legislature by the big employers. The legisla­tive representa­tives were practically just stooges of the Big Five. Legislative sessions sounded more like a Gilbert and Sullivan show than a genuine legislature.

Well, in the ’44 elections, under Jack’s lead, we endorsed a great many candidates, and the results were highly favorable.  One of the commitments we had where we made endorsements was that we would get a Little Wagner Act for Hawaii. We did get a Little Wagner Act in 1945 out of that legislature. It provided for collective bargaining elections for all agricul­tural workers. This included a lot of people not covered under the Wagner Act that Congress had passed ten years earlier to set up the NLRB.

Voting for candidates recommended by the union in ’44 was a direct offshoot of the whole organizing campaign. It was also one of the beginnings of the sociological breakthroughs in Hawaii. It took a while before you even had the sociological breakthrough of some of our workers going into Waikiki just to have a drink. In those days that was a rare thing. Waikiki was the tourist sec­tion. That was for haoles (whites). Our guys felt they belonged down in the Kalihi district, River Street, a different section of town. I had to persuade guys to join me for dinner at the Trop­ics, which was then across from the Royal Hawaiian. So this was also the beginning of the sociological breakthroughs.

A lot of the plantations toppled into place, but the one outfit that did present a bit of a problem was Waialua Sugar Company on Oahu. Waialua had always been a very prosper­ous plantation with a good piece of land and plenty of water. It paid more than the other plantations. I recall getting a telephone call from the manager, John Midkiff, asking whether I would be interested in coming out for dinner. I said sure.

I think Jack Kawano of the Honolulu longshore local was with me that night. Midkiff was very pleas­ant. When we got through dinner, he got down to business. He said, “Look, I know what you fellows are after, you want the dues. I’ll make arrangements where I’ll send you the dues each month.” I said, “We are not interested in the dues.” He said, “Of course you are, that is what unions are all about.”

I said, “No, we are interested in getting everybody organized. An organization means something else than collecting dues.” He said, “Well, I don’t think my people really want to belong.” I said, “We know the general atmosphere around here and that you pay a bit more and a lot of people feel pretty loyal on that score, but we’re still convinced they want the union and given a proper chance they’ll join.” He wasn’t con­vinced. Plus he had this thing in his head we couldn’t budge—the union wanted the dues and if the union got the dues, what do we want to kick about?

When we got back, we sat around and talked about the conversa­tion. We decided the only thing to do was bell the cat. The following Sunday we sent a group of organizers out there with cards. We said, “Start going house to house. If company cops or anybody else tries to stop you, call at once and we will have the lawyers run out there.” There was no interference of any kind and I’d say within a week or ten days we had Waialua organized. That was the only place I can recall running into real difficulty.

The workers lived in company camps on isolated plantations. These camps were divided in most cases by racial groups. That is the way the people themselves would talk about it: “Oh, that’s the Filipino Camp, that’s the Portuguese Camp, that’s the China Camp,” and so forth. As I said, though, we had made the decision that certain past mistakes would not be repeated. One would be no racial strikes. That meant there had to be a new interpreta­tion of unit leadership, because if you are not going to have a racial union or racial strikes, you had to, if neces­sary, force integra­tion of the leadership from the beginning.

Now I know better than to figure that issuing a union ruling on integration brings about integration. It’s a much more deep-going thing. But you have to start someplace, and that’s where we started. The instruction given to Frank when he set up the units was to get as many groups as possible represented.

A Japanese was almost always elected chairman, partly because the Japanese had a better command of English and partly because they had been extremely active in organizing. Frank would have the election for chair, and a Japanese would be elected. Right, nominations are open for vice-chair. Somebody would nominate another Japanese. Jack would say, “Nope, you’ve got a Japanese already, now you’ve got to get somebody else. Nominate a Filipi­no, a Portuguese, a Chinese, or anyone from the other groups on the plantation.” Not all of these situations were completely happy, let me put it that way.

But whatever doubts or reserva­tions any groups might have had about the program of integration disappeared entirely with the 1946 sugar strike. The ’46 strike brought all the groups together as a fighting force, where they won a major struggle for their life—we’d either get over the hump or that was it. During the strike, when it came to disci­pline, doing picket duty, eating in the general soup kitch­en, and the fami­lies all mixing, a great change took place. I’m not saying racial division disap­peared entirely from the social scene in Hawaii, but I am saying that whatever there remained in the way of racial feel­ings in the union really went out the window with the ’46 strike.

Another major problem, but more of a tactical one, was that we were determined that we would not have plantation-by-plantation strikes or island-by-island strikes. If we had to fight, it would be all the plantations down at one time. The theory had developed during the earlier Japanese and Filipino at­tempts to organize that the workers on one plantation would strike and all the others would pitch in and help them. That’s like trying to match dollars with the employers. There is a certain point at which you are going to go broke—you don’t have the reserves. So we decided that that was a fundamental mistake that had been made. The key to the thing would be industry-wide bargaining.

Our first sugar contract in 1945 was just a sort of holding action, a recognition thing with maintenance of member­ship. It was just to get a contract under our belt. This had nothing to do with the major decision we had made that if it ever came to a beef, we would take it on as an industry. That decision finally was implemented when we deadlocked with the employers in 1946.

By that time we figured we had to put on a major push for enor­mous change and get rid of the prerequisite system, where the workers got poor company housing and rudimentary supplies and medical services instead of cash. We wanted to move toward a genuine kind of unionism where we’d build up the grievance machinery and get contract provisions such as no discrimination because of race, creed, or color. In other words, we had decided we wanted the framework of a genuine labor agreement. And in ’46, of course, the policy was when we struck, we shut it all down.

You could do something when you had the whole industry down that you couldn’t do before when there had been piecemeal strikes. We knew how in the past the employers had evicted people from the company camps. When the ’46 strike took place, we notified the employers that if they evicted one family, everyone was going to empty out and go to the county, city hall or state building and camp out and tell them, “Okay, you feed us.” I think the vision of the 24,000-25,000 workers we had pulling that off at one time must have given those employers the hor­rors. We could have done it, too. We had the discipline and the steam. There were no evic­tions.

In the ’46 strike guys set themselves up fishing, hunting and growing small gardens. The employers got over this business of ever evicting anybody and the men all knew that if you couldn’t pay the rent you didn’t pay the rent and you simply owed it, that’s all. One thing winning the 79-day ’46 strike taught the sugar workers was that they could be damn self-sufficient and they could take a long beef if they had to. They could survive.