TOIL AND TROUBLE IN THE PROMISED LAND:

The Dispatcher, May 1995
Edited by Harvey Schwartz

GEORGE MARTIN

“The Portuguese, Spaniards, Japanese and Filipinos were kept separated. The intent of the companies was to keep people divided.”

I was born in 1924 on the Big Island of Hawaii. My parents came from the Portuguese-held island of Madeira. My dad worked for one of the sugar companies, got in a battle with a boss, quit, and went to work for Hawaii Consolidated Railway, where he stayed from the 1920s until 1946.

When I was growing up in the Big Island they had segregated camps where there was sugar plantation housing. The camps had public baths; it wasn’t pretty, with whitewash lumber, cracks in the walls and leaky roofs. The Portuguese, Spaniards, Japanese and Filipinos were kept separated. The intent of the companies was to keep people divided. The Portuguese were paid a little bit better; they became supervisors or got jobs like mule wagon operator. The others were given a little lower jobs on the totem pole and less wages. The best jobs were for the so-called haole, the Anglo-Saxon, western European, Scotchman, Englishman. He’d be the superintendent, the machinist, the engineer, the office personnel man.

I was in high school when World War II began, and I went to work for Automated Sugar Company as a mechanic helper. Once you went to work for the sugar companies they wouldn’t release you. They controlled the political scene and the legislature; they were in command of the banks, transportation, the utilities companies, and the draft boards. When I was 19 years old, during the war, I volunteered for the merchant marine. I told them who I worked for and that was it; they never recruited me. The only guys who got out were ones who were active in the union; they got drafted.

I joined the union in 1944 when a couple of the longshoremen approached us. I asked my parents, “What do you think I should do?” because if you mentioned the word union in front of the employers it was like mentioning the plague. My dad said, “Join! We’ve had enough trouble with these God damn plantations.” So I did.

I became active and helped to organize even before we had a contract. I’d go out late at night, in some cases way up in the camps. You had to be very secretive because as soon as the employer finds out you’d get fired. They wouldn’t care what the law said.

I was a heavy equipment mechanic and a steward at the sugar company when this new migration came in 1946. The Big Five sugar companies recruited 6000 Filipinos that year. The first sugar contract we had territorial-wide was in 1945. It wasn’t a very good one but it was there. The following year we’d be negotiating a new contract. We appealed to the employers not to recruit 6000 Filipino because the war was over and they’d be hiring back the returning veterans. The war labor shortage would disappear. The employers said no; in anticipation of a trike they thought they’d hire 6000 Filipinos as strike breakers.

So we had our own Filipino guys go on the ships that were going to bring these people in. We did this through cooperation of the Marine Cooks and Stewards. We sent our guys on the ship as crewmen, as sailors. We recruited every one of the Filipinos; we signed them up as ILWU members before they got to Hawaii.

They got there a couple of weeks before the strike. We opened up soup kitchens and fed them. Not one of them scabbed on us, and we won that first state-wide sugar strike. Strikes before that in Hawaii were not successful because they were racial strikes. The Filipinos would strike, the Japanese and Portuguese would work. The Japanese would strike, the Filipinos and Portuguese would work. Those were just racial unions, not like the ILWU. We did things differently.

Lanai got organized about 1946. It was a pineapple plantation private island. Anyone coming in and out of the island was screened. There was fear even though we were organized; it was a real plantation town.

I worked in Lanai for one summer after my first year in high school, in 1940. We stayed in what they called the single man’s quarters. It was like a barracks. We had a dormitory with open baths. You got up early in the morning; lunch was already made for you. They used to serve us sardines, and during the day it got so awfully hot that you’d eat the sardines and you’d get sick. And we had the runs; I never ate sardines again, I swear to God, until I was about 45.

I brought home $114 for those three months. We were working overtime, too. We’d start at seven in the morning and we’d get through at five o’clock in the afternoon. We’d pick pine for eight hours and then we’d load trucks for a couple of hours. It was all hand picking. There was no machinery in those days. You’d pick the pineapple up put it in this canvas bag, and take it to the end of the row. You’d dump it there. When you finished that row you’d chop the ends off. Then you’d put it in boxes. The supervisors were pretty tough. They’d say, “Keep moving;” they were on your back. It hardened me up, I’ll tell you that. Several kids got fired because they’d talk back.

When one of those pineapple leaves prick you it’s inevitable, you’re gonna get an infection. It got swollen and boil would come. You’d go into the company clinic and the doctor would just tell you bend over, and they’d squeeze it out, and that was it. They’d put a patch on and say, “Go home.” In the front you had canvas pants over your trousers, but in the back there was nothing to protect you.

Much later, in 1951, when Lanai struck Dole for seven months, the other islands contributed food and money to the Lanai strikers. We felt the employers were out to break the union on Lanai. We thought we had to win to put the employers in their place because we’d have future battles with them, with the Big Five, Hawaii’s dominant companies—the employers were all interrelated in pineapple and sugar. It was a crossroads of where this union was going to go.

SECINANDO BUENO

“In the Philippines, Hawaii was noted as the money bag of God. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association opened an office to recruit workers. I decided to go.”

At the end of 1945 I was working as a checker in a military depot in the Philippines. This job might end any time, and in the Philippines it was hard to land a job. Also, in the Philippines Hawaii was noted as the money bag of God. My uncles came to Hawaii and they had better living conditions. Young boys of my age talked about maybe becoming workers in Hawaii. Finally that was true, because the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association opened an office to recruit workers to come to Hawaii and work in sugar and pineapple. I decided to go.

I was used to riding boats, but many others were seasick. One man died; they just threw him in the ocean. We sailed from the Philippines in January 1946; it took 16 days before we landed in Hilo. From there we were transferred to Lanai, and we started work on February 2, 1946. But prior to our landing in Hawaii some of the crew—Portuguese and haoles—explained what a labor union is. They told us what a union can do for working people. To me, it’s amazing that I was one of those guys who already signed for ILWU membership when we reached Hawaii.

Later some men from longshore came to Lanai and organized the ILWU there. I attended every meeting as soon as the union was organized. When I first got to Lanai I did picking, weeding, manual jobs. In that first year we got 40 cents an hour.

They gave us a house with four bedrooms and a kitchen. The company wanted us to move out of the house and into the “citizens’ quarter.” We never moved and they were not able to force us. The citizens’ quarter was an area surrounded by two bedroom houses with a communal restroom and shower. Even in my house at midnight I had to go use the restroom in the citizens’ quarter because all those houses never got complete toilets. The company owned the houses and the citizens’ quarter. Housing was free at the beginning, but as the union demanded more, they took that away.

PEDRO CASTILLO

“When we joined the union, and the platform of the union covered the differences of the national groups, we united the people.”

I came to Lanai from the Philippines in 1946. My first job was picking pineapple. When we were new here the bosses tried to push us to work as hard as they like. They’d tell you to pick faster or cut the top faster. If you were not able to go beyond their standard they’d tell you, “Go, go a little bit more.”

In 1946-1947 there were only a couple of work breaks. There were no portable toilets—you just went all over the place.

There was no picking machine in early 1946. The picking machine came in late 1947. When the machinery came we felt lighter than carrying the pineapple and we produced more. In the early part we worked six or seven days a week; when the machine came they reduced the working days to five. We made smaller money at first, but because of wage increases under the ILWU we earned more money later.

I joined the ILWU six months after arriving in Lanai. The union organizers went house to house; I was happy to receive them. I understood the program to have better wages and working conditions. I asked the organizers: “Can what you are telling me be done?” They said, “To unite everybody, that is your power. If the workers want to achieve benefits, you have to stick together and strike the company.” We had different opinions among different nationalities, but when we joined the union, and the platform of the union covered the differences of the national groups, we united the people.