National Affairs: Paradise Reprieved

The grip which crow-beaked Harry Bridges had fastened on Hawaii (TIME, Nov. 4) was loosened last week. His longshoremen’s union called off a strike which for eleven weeks had gripped Hawaii’s economy by the throat.

In 1935, Bridges had sent his organizers from San Francisco to Hawaii to sweep in recruits for his maritime union. It was virgin territory. Bridges’ men also took in pineapple-plantation workers and a smattering of railroad workers, cannery workers, truck drivers. But their busiest field was the sugar plantations. They signed up plantation hands by the thousands in a heterogeneous organization that soon began to look like John L. Lewis’ District 50.

A year ago the union made its demand for more money, got a minimum of 41¢ an hour. This year Bridges made his master stroke. He called the union out on strike. Demands: still higher wages, a 40-hour week, a closed shop, and joint company-union management of company-owned housing, company-supplied fuel, medical care, etc.

When Hawaii’s 33 plantation owners balked, Bridges demonstrated in miniature what organized labor can do to a country’s economy.* The continuing maritime strike on the West Coast (in the process of settlement this week) helped his cause. The islands, long a tourist paradise, depend for sustenance on seaborne traffic. Since the shutdown of Pacific shipping seven weeks ago, only three relief ships, sent by the Department of Interior, have reached Hawaii with vitally needed food.

Meanwhile, the strike of 28,006 sugarfield workers spread a pall over all commerce, trade and finance. In Hilo (pop. 23,353), drug sales dropped as much as 30%; dry goods, 33%; auto service, 60%. Plantationslost an estimated $21 million of business; workers lost almost $8 million in wages. Acres of unattended cane, which must be irrigated to survive, withered in the hot Hawaiian sunshine, and the world lost 180,850 tons of raw sugar. Estimates of the time it will take to put plantations back on production schedules ran up to four years.

In the settlement Bridges won one concession, a net wage increase of a minimum 18¢ an hour, to which the owners had agreed almost a month ago. But he had to forego the other demands, including the much-wanted closed shop. Bridges will undoubtedly have another go at Paradise another day.

*For some spirited views, see LETTERS.