Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

by Kim Kelly

In 1944 sugar’s “Big Five” companies—Alexander & Baldwin, American Factors, Castle & Cooke, C. Brewer, and Theo. Davies—embarked upon a two-year plan to cut the heart out of Hawai’i’s domestic workforce, hoping to demoralize its Japanese employees by recruiting six thousand new laborers from the Philippines. In the midst of World War II, Japan had been an occupying force in the Philippines, and planters assumed the divide would translate to their workers. Having caught wind of the plan, the sugar workers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), infiltrated the labor importation apparatus and sent union organizers to take jobs as cooks and stewards aboard ships sailing from the Philippines to Hawai’i. By the time the new recruits stepped ashore on January 30, 1946, they had already signed union cards, and arrived to a hero’s welcome, complete with a union-provided brass band. “When those employers saw those [union] buttons, man, their faces dropped a foot-and-a-half, you know?” union organizer Frank Thompson later recalled. “So then we raised a lot of hell because the accommodations the planters had for these people were the same as you’d do cattle, only worse.”