A REBEL IN PARADISE

A REBEL IN PARADISE
By Dick Meister

When Jack Hall died, flags were flown at half-staff throughout Hawaii,
longshoremen closed the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego
for 24 hours, and thousands of other workers in Hawaii and along the west
coast of the United States and Canada also stopped work to show their
respect. For, though largely unheralded now, Jack Hall was one of America’s
greatest labor leaders.

He was director of organization for the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union and one of its two vice presidents when a stroke killed him
in 1971at the age of 55 in San Francisco. But it was not what he had done
during the previous 18 months in the drafty, run-down headquarters presided
over by the legendary Harry Bridges that made Hall extraordinary.

Rather, it was what he had done before that in Hawaii where he served for
more than a quarter-century as the ILWU’s regional director -- the key
leader in bringing industrial democracy to Hawaii, in transforming Hawaii
from virtually a feudalistic territory controlled by a few huge financial
interests into a modern pluralistic state in which workers and their unions
have a major voice.

“I don’t think there has been any single individual in the last 30 years who
has made a more substantial contribution to our political, social and
economic life,” then-Gov. John Burns of Hawaii said on learning of Hall’s
death. He credited Hall “for the full flowering of democracy in our
islands.”

Hall’s career closely paralleled the development of U.S. unions during his
lifetime. Like the unions, Hall started out during the Great Depression of
the 1930s as a powerless outsider, but ended up just three decades later as
a powerful member of the Establishment. He became an insider who could draw
praise, not only from union members and working people generally, but also
from some of the same employers who once attacked him as a “communist
agitator,” while at the same time arousing the suspicions of young people
and others who felt he might have moved too close to his former enemies.

Hall, the son of a miner, had signed on as a merchant seaman –- the only job
he could find -- immediately after graduating from a Southern California
high school in 1932. He landed in Hawaii four years later, a tall, skinny
22-year-old whose glimpses of incredible poverty in the Far East had
sickened and angered him and, he later recalled, “determined which side of
the fence I was on.” Striking longshoremen at Port Allen had asked the
Sailors Union for help, and the union sent Hall.

He applied lessons he had learned while taking part in the waterfront strike
led three years earlier in San Francisco by Bridges, quickly emerging as a
leader in getting the Hawaiian longshoremen at least some measure of the
union recognition that had been won in San Francisco and other West Coast
ports in 1934. He was a principal leader, too, in the later attempts by the
ILWU to organize the sugar and pineapple plantations that dominated Hawaii’s
economy.

The odds were heavily against the organizers. Virtually all phases of life
in what was then the Territory of Hawaii were controlled by five extremely
powerful holding companies, popularly known as “the Big Five,” that owned
most of the territory’s arable land. As the ILWU’s official history notes,
they “followed policies designed to keep labor as powerless – economically
and politically – as the serfs on medieval feudal baronies.”

Workers, carefully segregated by racial and ethnic groups, lived in company
housing on the big sugar and pineapple plantations where they worked, bought
their food and clothing in company stores there, and had little choice but
to do exactly what the boss told them to do, at pay of less than 50 cents an
hour.

The tightly unified employers crushed organizing efforts by pitting worker
against worker. They purposely employed workers of as many different
nationalities as possible on each plantation –- Japanese, Filipinos,
Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Rican and others -- and, the ILWU said,
“by unequal treatment, discriminatory pay scales, separate housing areas and
subtle propaganda they stimulated racial suspicion.” Thus when workers “were
finally forced by their misery to organize into unions, they made the tragic
mistake of following racial lines.”

The strike was the only weapon available to the workers. But when workers of
a particular nationality struck to demand union rights, they’d be replaced
immediately with workers of another nationality.

Hall talked with the workers endlessly about the obvious need to bring them
together in a single union, often in meetings that were held in secret,
outside the closely guarded plantations. He stressed the basic message of
working class solidarity, telling the workers over and over that they could
not achieve the unified strength necessary to combat exploitation by
employers if they continued to remain apart because of racial and ethnic
differences.

“Know your class,” Hall told them, “and be loyal to it.”

Hall proved his case in a strike by Filipino longshoremen at the port of
Ahukoni in 1938. The ships the Filipinos normally loaded and unloaded were
diverted to Port Allen, where most of the longshoremen were Japanese, on
the assumption that the Japanese would work on the ships. But they didn’t.
They became the first racial group in Hawaii to support strikers of another
race.

It was a very important start, but only a start. Most workers remained
skeptical. It was no great chore to persuade workers who did onerous hand
labor for so little pay that they were being mistreated, but convincing them
to trust the organizers who insisted that they cross the racial and ethnic
lines that had long divided them was extremely difficult. But Hall, a tough,
plainspoken, hard-drinking man who made his rounds of the plantations in an
ancient beat-up sedan, eventually won them over with his simple and direct
approach and an obvious honesty that was to have as great an impression on
employers and politicians in later years.

As even one of Hall’s chief enemies in those days, the Honolulu Advertiser,
acknowledged after his death, “There was no sham or pretense in him. He was
absolutely honest. He never lied. He never slanted things. He never shaded
the truth.”

The ILWU won its first victory in 1938 – a union contract at a pineapple
plantation on Kauai. But the crucial breakthrough came later that year when
the ILWU formed a political organization, the Kauai Progressive League, to
elect a pro-labor candidate to the Territorial Senate against an incumbent
who also happened to manage a sugar plantation.

Victories in other elections followed, and by 1944 the League became so
strong Hall was able to write and lobby through the Legislature a “Little
Wagner Act.” It granted Hawaii’s farmworkers the formal rights to
unionization that are guaranteed most non–agricultural workers under the
federal Wagner Act but still denied most farmworkers outside the islands.

The ILWU followed the victory with a massive organizing drive, but was
tested almost immediately, in 1946, when it waged a 79-day strike to demand
union contracts from sugar plantation owners. Similar showdowns came in 1947
for pineapple workers and in 1949 for longshoremen. The struggle was often
brutal. Several organizers were beaten by thugs presumably hired by employer
interests, and there was an attempt on Hall’s life. But the ILWU came
through it all intact and strengthened.

The union’s political muscles also grew -- so much so that, in 1946, Hall
and his colleagues led an election campaign that broke 50 consecutive years
of Republican control in Hawaii’s legislature.

The plantation owners and their Republican allies struck back by labeling
Hall and other ILWU leaders as subversive radicals. The Federal Government
backed them by attempting to convict Hall of conspiring with six officers of
the tiny Hawaiian Communist Party to violate the Smith Act by advocating, in
that familiar phrase of the McCarthyite 1950s, “the overthrow of the
government by force and violence.”

Hall refused to answer specific questions about Communist Party membership,
spoke proudly of his youthful radicalism, discussed his later belief that
“socialism isn’t practical” – and was found guilty along with the six others
in 1953, fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the maximum
penalty under the law. Hall remained free while ILWU members conducted an
intensive – and expensive -- campaign to overturn the conviction. Finally,
five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court granted their appeal, agreeing that
Hall’s constitutional rights had been violated.

There were strikes and other disputes after that, but never again was Hall’s
standing or that of the union seriously challenged. The ILWU assumed a
commanding position in Hawaii’s economic life. And it became the most
important political force in the islands, forming a coalition with the
Democratic Party that gave the union as much influence as the employers’ Big
Five had exerted previously through the Republican Party..

It was a rare politician who was elected without ILWU backing and, as a
consequence, the government and legislative programs in Hawaii became among
the most worker-oriented and progressive anywhere in the fields of health,
education, welfare, labor and social services. The state’s political
leadership became the most racially and ethnically mixed in the world.

Hall became a highly prominent figure in civic as well as economic and
political affairs. He was appointed to the Honolulu Police Commission and
other mayoral and gubernatorial bodies and led Community Chest, United Fund
and similar decidedly non-radical activities. Hall even won praise from the
business community, editorial writers and other conservative interests for
what one management spokesman called “highly responsible leadership and
unquestioned integrity,” while getting his usual praise from workers who
cited the same traits.

Hall’s ability to please both sides was perhaps best shown in his approach
to mechanization. The ILWU, in a decision later made by the union in all
West Coast ports as well, decided after World War II that it would not fight
the introduction of job-stealing machinery in Hawaii. Hall and his members,
longshoremen and plantation workers alike, reasoned that work should be as
easy and efficient as possible – as long as there were special benefits for
workers who might have to step aside for streamlined equipment that could do
their jobs faster and better.

Increased pensions were offered workers who would take early retirement, but
the major tool was an employer-financed “repatriation fund” that paid older
workers – most of them Filipinos – up to $2,500 plus transportation costs if
they would choose to return home. Many had long wanted to return, but had
never made enough money to do so.

By 1960, the plantation workforce was cut to 9,000, about half its pre-war
size. At the same time, hand labor was virtually eliminated. No longer were
there gangs of workers wielding machetes and carrying loads of sugarcane and
pineapples on their backs. Specially designed bulldozers and cranes were
brought in to do the heavy work. Because there were fewer of them and
because the machinery enabled them to produce more, Hawaii’s farmworkers
became – and remain – far and away the country’s most highly compensated.
Other farmworkers continue to toil in poverty, while the Hawaiian workers
earn wages comparable to those of non-farm workers and benefits unknown on
most farms – medical and dental care, sick leave, paid holidays and
vacations, pensions, overtime and severance pay, unemployment insurance and
even, in some cases, a 40-hour workweek.

Plantation and longshore workers still are the backbone of the ILWU in
Hawaii, but Hall long ago led the union into just about every industry in
the islands. Bakers, factory workers, automobile salesmen, supermarket
clerks and a wide variety of other workers, especially including hotel
workers and others in Hawaii’s ever-expanding tourist industry – all carry
union cards. It’s their guarantee of economic and political rights and
rewards, of dignity and self-respect and the chance to determine their own
destinies, of an effective voice on the job and in their communities, of
fair and equal treatment their forebears could only dream of.

Jack Hall left a truly remarkable legacy.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2337
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Biography
Location:	Honolulu Hawaii USA
Year:	1971
Person:	Jack Hall