Honolulu Lite
LET'S get something straight: Hawaii's dockworkers are not going to strike. To allow a handful of longshoremen (and a few longshorewomen, probably) to strangle the entire state would expose Hawaii for what it is, a third-world country controlled by powerful union leaders and an entrenched political machine that has been around longer than Stalin held Russia. Hoarding hope
against a dock strikeKSSK's Michael W. Perry and Larry Price are convinced that Gov. Ben Cayetano will ride in on his white horse to stop the threatened strike at the last moment and that the rolling statewide strike votes are just part of the long, slow dance we all have to go through before the matter can be resolved.
They may be right. I can't see the governor allowing Hawaii residents to be used as hostages, which is what a strike would amount to. And while the dockworkers' unions have to take a hard line as part of the negotiation game, I doubt they really would want to suffer through the heat and bad will a strike would generate.
Imagine the aftermath of a strike that emptied our supermarkets of life's basic necessities. A mom pushes her kid in a cart past a longshoreman picking up a six pack of beer and says to the child: "That's the bad man who took away your Froot Loops."
Just threatening a strike has caused people to become jumpy. My wife brought home enough toilet paper to papier mache Diamond Head. At first, I thought she was trying to make some personal point, which kind of hurt my feelings. But, no, it was just that several thousand feet of toilet paper was on sale and what with the possible strike and everything, well, you can't be too careful. I didn't point out that in the case of a strike our kitchen cupboards would be bare and so the toilet paper supply might be just a bit of an overkill.
OTHER people have been hoarding the usual stuff people hoard: Spam, rice, Vienna sausages and canned corned beef from Argentina. I think it's a law that if there is hoarding to be done, Spam has to be purchased. The only time you can eat Spam without guilt is after surviving a natural disaster or facing some sort of civil unrest.
I don't understand why hoarding extends to other forms of bad canned meats, especially those from South American countries. Hasn't anyone in America learned how to can corned beef? Why does it always have to come from places like Brazil and Chile? When we grew up we had the same can of South American corned beef in our cupboard through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nobody in the house had the guts to actually open it up.
You can go for years living in Hawaii feeling like you are part of the rest of the country and then the threat of a dock strike comes along and reminds you that we are second-class U.S. citizens.
Most of everything we need to live has to be shipped here by air or sea. That gives the people involved in the transportation of these goods amazing power. An all-out dock strike would be a serious abuse of that power. It would be a slap in the face to the public by the dock unions, the message being: "We control your lives. We control your food and your children's food. And if we don't get the money we want, we can cut it off."
The Democratic party couldn't handle the political backlash a strike that emptied out supermarkets would cause. That's why, as Perry and Price say, the governor is grooming his white horse.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite