The 1946 Sugar Strike

The Hawaiian sugar plantation system ran on ethnic division as deliberately as it ran on cane. The planters who built it in the mid-nineteenth century understood that workers who could not communicate across language barriers, who were paid different wages by nationality, and who were housed in separate camps by ethnic group, were workers who could not organize together. For most of a century, the strategy held.

On September first, nineteen forty-six, it broke. Led by the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and organizers including Jack Hall, somewhere between twenty-one thousand and twenty-eight thousand sugar workers across thirty-three of the islands' thirty-four plantations walked off simultaneously. Filipino workers, Japanese workers, Korean workers, Puerto Rican workers, Chinese workers, and Portuguese workers who had spent their working lives in a system designed to keep them apart stayed out together for seventy-nine days.

The planters had assumed that ethnic tensions would fracture the strike within weeks. They did not. The union had spent years building cross-ethnic solidarity, meeting workers in their own languages, training organizers from each community. When the strike ended, the workers won wage gains and ended the system of wages tied to national origin. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association had spent decades constructing that system. The union dismantled the wage structure in less than three months.

The nineteen forty-six strike broke the political power of the big planters and began the shift of Hawaiian politics toward organized labor and eventually toward the Democratic dominance that has defined the state's politics ever since. The workers who crossed ethnic lines on September first did more than win a contract. They changed the structure of Hawaii.