September 1, 1946 – The Great Hawaii Sugar Strike: “Rice and Roses”

Some 26,000 sugar workers and their families – 76,000 people in all – began a 79-day strike on September 1, 1946 – this day in history – that completely shut down 33 of the 34 sugar plantations in the islands. The Great Hawaii Sugar Strike, directed by the leadership of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), ushered in a new era of participatory democracy both on the plantations and throughout Hawaii’s political and social institutions, according to the University of Hawaii ’s Center for Labor Education and Research.

Chinese contract workers on a Hawai’i sugar cane plantation

Historian Miyako Martinez argues:

Hawaii is an exceptional case in American labor history because of its workforce made up of mostly non-white and immigrant workers—particularly of indigenous Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese descent.”

William Puette, Director of the Center for Labor Education and Research at the University of Hawaii – West Oʻahu observed: “In Hawaii, these plantations exercised what has really been described to a lot of people as ʻfeudalisticʻ control over workers.”

Martinez explains that a group of five families, from American, German, and English backgrounds, dominated the economic and political circumstances on the islands. They recruited contract laborers from other countries to build their workforce. She reports: “In 1922, 2,533 Portuguese, 16,992 Japanese, and 18,189 Filipinos” made up about 85% of the sugar production workforce.”

The workers had attempted strikes prior to this one, but because the labor unions had been organized by ethnic groups, internecine conflict plagued the efforts. In 1946, however, all the sugar workers of every ethnic group joined together in the same labor organization.

Plantation workers with clothing to protect skin and prevent centipedes from entering, via Topics of Meta

Puette outlines the challenges faced by the ILWU:

Understanding that every strike committee had to have Filipino and Japanese leadership and that all the meetings had to be conducted in English, Japanese, and Ilocano at the bare minimum, and sometimes also Visayan. . . . It’s amazing how they were able to do things. They were able to show the way for organizing and not by racial or ethnic groups, which was a pretty common thing to do in Hawaii before then and had never really been successful.”

Martinez documents how extensive the strike was, pointing out that ILWU dockworkers on the islands and on the U.S. mainland coasts shut down the flow of sugar and supplies. As the strike became more successful, union members also stopped picketing on the plantations and moved to mass picketing at managers’ homes.

The strike concluded with an agreement for the improvement of the material conditions of Hawaiian workers, including a wage increase and a ban on foreign contract labor. Other features were implemented such as “a nondiscrimination policy, a formal grievance procedure, increased sickness and vacation allowances (six to nine days) […] seniority preferences, pensions, and severance pay.”

The University of Hawaii labor center points out:

The strength of the 1946 sugar strike and the community organizing it built upon was so solid on the neighbor islands, especially Kaua’i and Hawai’i, that it soon became the bedrock of a new political order.”