Louis Goldblatt and the Early Days of the ILWU in Hawaii, 1947-60

Edited by Harvey Schwartz

Louis Goldbl­att

In 1947 red-baiting was going on and was picking up steam. Amos Ignacio, then Local 142 Big Island Division vice-president, charged that the ILWU was dominated by communists. He tried to lead people out of the ILWU and to build a separate union of Hawai­ian workers. I think Harry Bridges might have been down during one of the sessions when we were kicking the thing around. We said, “Look, there is no reason why we shouldn’t bring this thing to a head in a hurry.” Remem­ber, we had won the ’46 sugar strike. We felt we had the strength.

The idea occurred to us, “Why not have a special convention [the special Hilo Unity Conference] and why not have it right where the so-called Ignacio Revolt was supposed to be taking place, in Hilo?” We took over the armory. Jack Hall and I were at that convention, which was held in early 1948. We decided we wanted Ignacio at the convention so he could present all of his arguments in favor of breaking away from the ILWU. We tried to get in touch with Ignacio. All of a sudden he disap­peared.

So why let go of a good thing? We sent out hunting parties—different groups of guys—to look for Ignacio to convey the message that he had nothing to be concerned about. He would be politely treated. There would be no attempt to do him any harm. He would be given a full audience to come down to the convention and say his piece. But nobody could find Ignacio. He never did come to the convention.

We took the red-baiting discussion head on in Hilo. I said, “Look, we’re not communists, we’re unionists. We are also the kind of union where people can believe as they please. They can be democrats, they can be republicans, they can be communists, they can be Catholics, as long as they are good union people.”

I think this was the only time I ever used a letter I had gotten from Dillon Meyer. Meyer became the head of the War Reloca­tion Authority after the Japanese Americans had been evacuated from the West Coast and set up in camps early in World War II. He was determined to try to empty out those camps and get people back living a normal life. So he was quite a hero to Japanese Ameri­cans on the West Coast. After the war I got a letter from him.

Meyer said he was reviewing the records of Representative John H. Tolan’s congres­sional committee hearing held in San Francisco around March 1942 to consider if the Japanese should be evacuat­ed. I had decided I would testify against the evacuation. I guess I was the only trade unionist who did. They had a large number of people lined up to testify for it—then-California Attorney General Earl Warren, the San Francisco Labor Council President Jack Shelley—everybody got on the “Yellow Menace” bandwagon. Well, Dillon Meyer sent me this letter that my testimony had stood like a beacon light in the whole hearing.

At any rate, for the first time I used that letter. I read it at the ’48 convention. I said, “I want you to think for a minute as to who your great friends were in Hawaii who said a word of protest about the Japanese American evacuation on the West Coast. Here you’ve got the Advertiser newspaper supporting the revolt against the ILWU. Where were they during this time? What were they saying?  How about all these company agencies, how about all your politi­cians?”

By that time, as far as the Japanese at the convention were concerned, they were solid as rocks. The Filipinos were good too. It went to a referendum and the vote was overwhelming to stay in the ILWU. That ended Ignacio for good. We came out of that stronger than when we went in. This held us in good stead when other red-baiting attacks came along like in 1949, during the big Hawai­ian longshore strike for wage parity with the West Coast, where red-baiting was practi­cally the sole instrument of the employers.

One of the outstanding features of the ’49 strike was the rather minimal effect that the red-baiting had on our members compared to the degree of the on­slaught, with its “Dear Joe” [Stalin] editorials and one headline after another. The fact that we had gone through some struggles, including the ’48 convention, meant that the guys were pretty well inured to a lot of this stuff. In retrospect I’d say that the ’48 conven­tion was a good thing and the referendum vote even better.

In ’47, though, we did take a kick in the pants on pineapple. We lost a big strike that year. Several factors were in­volved. There were a lot of seasonal workers with whom the union had no con­tact. The industry would bring in about 10,000 seasonals to work in the pineapple canneries in the summer. A lot of them were college and high school students who depend­ed on the season for that extra couple of bucks to go to school. They went through the picket lines.

The field workers stayed absolutely solid, like out in Waipio. In places like Lanai, nothing budged. Yet the seasonal workers were so much of a larger group, that in terms of propor­tion of num­bers, the support did not appear to be there. The preliminary work of trying to get to them had not been done.

There was also an unfortunate fascination with striking at the peak of the season. But, if at the peak of the season, there are a lot of seasonal workers coming in over whom you have no control or no contact, then the peak of the season doesn’t mean a thing. There has also always been a question in my mind as to whether the harvesting is more important than the cultivation. In some ways, striking in agriculture during the cultivation period might be more effective because you have a stable work force that, if you organize effectively, should be very tight.

We decided we had to settle and back up—patch up the mistakes we had made, strengthen the organization, do a little bit of getting to the seasonal workers. After ’47 the pineapple employers enforced plant by plant contracts. We recouped, but it took a while, until the Lanai pineapple strike in 1951. I happened to be down there when that strike began. We had just finished up some small negotiations in pineapple, but we really didn’t negotiate. The guys were pretty well forced to the wall and had to take what the employers offered.

I recall a meeting with the Lanai guys. They said, “Do we have the right to strike?” I said, “Sure.” They said, “We don’t want to take the contract, we are not going to.” I said, “The employ­ers want to go plantation by plantation, and there is no ques­tion—they are able to make it stick. That’s the way it is. It will take a while before we are strong enough to handle it.”

They said, “Well, that’s not the question we asked—do we have the right to strike?” I said, “Yes, but you’re not going to be able to spread the strike. If you shut down Lanai, you can’t picket the canneries in Honolulu. We don’t have the power to shut them down effectively. We’ll help you as best we can, with money, with bumming committees, and so forth. But if you strike Lanai by itself, if you think you can get by in less than four or five months, maybe six, forget it. It’ll be a long beef.”

They went right back to the same question, “Do we have the right to strike?” I said, “Yes, I’ve told you that.” That’s all they wanted to know. The next thing I knew, the strike was on and sure enough that strike lasted a long time—about six or seven months. I found out more and more about the real issues as the strike went on. Partly it was a business of having something rammed down their neck which they didn’t want. They were independent think­ing. Then there were all kinds of other peripheral issues I knew nothing about.

For example, not long before the 1946 sugar strike the employers had brought 6,000 new Filipino workers to Hawaii from the Philip­pine Islands over our objections. This we interpreted as a threat to our new organization. The Filipinos came in two ships. We got some of our guys on board as members of the Marine Cooks and Stewards union. They did the signing up. The Filipinos were all in the ILWU by the time they got to Hawaii. They stuck with the union right through the 1946 strike, too.

Some of the Filipinos brought over in 1946 had been assigned for Lanai. After they had been at Lanai for a couple of years, and made some friends, they all stuck very close together. Then the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, which owned the whole island, decided they had brought over an unneces­sary number. The company noti­fied these people one morning that they were being laid off and put them on a plane out that afternoon. Offhand that doesn’t seem very big, but this rankled the other Filipinos. As far as they were concerned, they had to get even. The company would­n’t even allow these guys time enough to have a party with their friends, a going-away deal. They didn’t allow anything—pack up, get out.

The Lanai workers had a couple of other grievances, little tiny grievances, not big grievances. The company had decided, between ’47 and ’51, that they had the upper hand and they were going to use it. So the grievance committee meetings were hopeless and the guys said, “To hell with arbitration. We are going to wait until we can get even.”

Well, the strike went on a long time. I had the feeling that with these guys, if you offered to sink the island, they’d say, “Fine, you got a deal.” One day we got a call from Jim Blaisdell, the employers’ representative. Jack Hall and I joined him at the Tropics in Honolulu. He said, “What will settle it?”

“There is only one way,” I said, “that I know of settling this strike and that is to get together a settlement that goes beyond Lanai. You open up all the pineapple contracts. Instead of the guys on Lanai getting 12 cents as they’d demanded–the other guys had settled for 8–they will get 15 cents. All the other pineap­ple outfits will get the 15, or an extra 7 cents. There are a whole string of grievances here that will go to an immediate grievance machinery. They will be settled in grievance and will not go to arbitration. The industry goes back into collective bargaining as a group and stays there.”

The next day there was a call from Blaisdell. The agreement was put together. I went over to Lanai and asked Pedro de la Cruz, the Lanai leader, to have his committee come around so we could meet with them. I said, “This is our recommendation.” The only impor­tant question that came from them was, “There is nothing wrong with what you agreed to, it’s fine, but are you telling us that all the workers who didn’t strike are going to get the extra 7 cents?” I said, “Yep.” They said, “That’s no good, they didn’t fight. They’re not entitled to anything.”

“The key issue here,” I said, “is that these employers have been able to ride rough shod and run broken field through the pineap­ple industry since 1947. Finally you turned it around. You showed them, okay, you wanted to run broken field, you can also get a single island strike. They’ve lost over 25 million bucks from their Lanai crop, it’s gone. They’ll be lucky to salvage the second crop. So what you’ve done is force them back into industry bargaining.”

I concluded, “You’ve won something for yourself and for every­body else in the indus­try. But more important is the unity.” They huddled among them­selves. Finally they said, “We’ll recom­mend.” Sure enough, the Lanai members ratified the agreement. The pineapple industry went back into industry-wide bargain­ing.

Another major issue we faced in the early 1950s was mechanization in agriculture. I had conversations with Jack Hall about this even before mechani­za­tion had much of an impact, probably in 1946. As far as we were concerned, mechanization would not only be inevitable, we saw nothing wrong with it, providing the workers were taken care of. As far as I am con­cerned, there is nothing socially uplifting in hand-cutting sugar cane—you’re just fighting dirt, dust, and bugs. It is some of the most difficult work in the world.

So we knew mechanization was coming along. How to take care of the people, that was the key. And there is the area where I think the union did some real pioneering. The idea was to shrink the work force from the top. We had all kinds of single guys, partic­ularly Filipino workers, who had been in Hawaii for 20 or 25 years. Originally they had come down there for three years, and 25 years later they were still looking for that ticket home. There was no question as to how they felt. But at the same time they were often also broke.

The big things that were written into the sugar con­tract in the 1950s were very substantial severance pay and a reparations allowance, which included transportation home, and a complete cash-out provision on all pension rights. A man was able to leave Hawaii for the Philip­pines with anywhere from $10,000, $14,000 to $16,000. Now that doesn’t look like a lot of money, but in 1950, ’51, ’52 it was. To many a worker this was more than enough not only to make the trip back, but also perhaps to open up a little store or just lead an easy life in the town where he came from.

If there was any one industry where a shrinking of the work force took place with a minimum of hardships, it was sugar. So that’s where our contract was novel. I don’t know of any place else where the contract was written out in these details. And I would say that if any person was responsible for doing a lot of work on this thing—including a lot of the heavy duty mathemati­cal work—it was Jack Hall. He was awfully good with a pencil.

We took up some of the slack in employment by organizing in the growing post-war tourism industry on the Outer Islands, those outside of Oahu. In the late 1950s we explained our thinking to Art Rutled­ge, the Teamster leader in Honolulu who often obstruct­ed our efforts. Hotels in Honolulu were Art’s. But we told him, “Look, so far as the Outer Islands are con­cerned, the hotels are something we have pio­neered in the organi­zation of those outside islands. There was nothing orga­nized there, not a thing. We’re the ones who knocked over the sugar and pineapple plantations. They’re shrinking. Our people are looking for jobs in other areas. When these hotels open up, that is where they’re going to have to go to work. That is our kuleana, our area.”