IT was close to midnight on Saturday, Aug. 31, 1946. The ILWU had called an industry-wide sugar strike, the first ever, to start at 12:01 a.m. Sept. 1. Members voted for it Aug. 1 by 15,406 in favor vs. 123 opposed. Hawaii’s first
industry-wide sugar strikeI was on Maui for the Star-Bulletin to cover the start of the strike there. One of the few places where there would be any "action" was the mill of Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., one of the largest in the then-Territory of Hawaii, where sugar was king of the economy.
Cane grinding at the HC&S mill had shut down Friday for the Labor Day weekend. Only repair work was done on Saturday, the last day before the strike became official. Thus the start-of-strike action at HC&S consisted only of two long-employed watchmen turning their time clocks over to two management men exactly at midnight. Continuing hourly watch rounds was essential for insurance purposes.
Neither Saburo Hashigawa, 63, nor K. Toma, 79, had ever been on strike before. All was new, too, to the two who took their places -- Lionel Andrade, night sugar boiler, and Walter McDougal, night engineer.
Before midnight Andrade and McDougal had walked the rounds with Hashigawa and Toma to learn the key clock stations to be punched in consecutive order and the light switches to throw at daylight. It was friendly. There were waves goodbye when Hashigawa and Toma handed over the clocks and left the mill at midnight.
A few scattered pickets appeared after midnight, but major picketing was left to start Monday at 7 a.m. The strike lasted 79 days with workers sustained by soup kitchen operated by a women's auxiliary, by fishing parties and by general camaraderie and sharing of burdens.
The union enforced a strict "no gambling" policy. It kept the strike peaceful except for a few isolated instances, none of them at HC&S. Union and management cooperated to maintain utility services in the plantation community but crop irrigation was shut down.
The Nov. 18 settlement agreement brought an end to the feudal system of worker dependence on the employer for housing and health care. These were "cashed out." HC&S later helped its employees buy homes in fee.
There were natural tensions and animosity yet workers after the strike continued the custom of inviting bosses to their homes to feast and drink on New Year's Day.
The ILWU wanted the strike to build worker solidarity, something its unit leaders had studied about in California Labor School. It did just that and ended ethnic pay differentials. Employers were frightened into a general awe of union power. More confrontations lay ahead on the ILWU-organized docks and pineapple plantations. A 128-day sugar strike occurred in 1958.
After that employers and labor settled into a new relationship that found Jack Hall, regional director of the ILWU, and Lowell Dillingham, one of our top business leaders, jointly recruiting an industry head for the 1966 Aloha United Way campaign. They told C.C. Cadagan, CEO of A&B, they wouldn't leave his office until he accepted. Hall even suggested there might be a stop-work meeting. Cadagan, a tough bird, capitulated.
Only last October when an essay on the sugar strike was presented to the Social Science Association of Hawaii did I learn that one of the "two other plantation officials" I wrote about as watching the time clock changeover was Robert H. Hughes. He later became president of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association and is a sugar industry historian.
TODAY Hughes joins other businessmen who watched the strike as young men in believing it was an important positive milestone for Hawaii labor-management relations. Few management people thought that way at the time.
Sugar had 34 plantations then, 33 of them struck. With federal sugar support reduced only five remain today, all on either Maui or Kauai. The work force is down to 2,000 but still will produce more than 40 percent as much raw sugar as was produced in the pre- and post-strike years with less than a tenth of the labor force. This year's crop will be about 375,000 tons. About 201,000 will come from HC&S, long our most efficient plantation.
The sons, daughters and grandchildren of plantation laborers have gone on to colleges and advanced study. They hold places of significance in Hawaii and elsewhere.