For more than three decades, Jack Hall was a hulking presence on the waterfront, at union bargaining tables and in Hawai'i politics.
A skillful labor organizer, he took a union reviled by conservative lawmakers in the 1940s, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, and made it more than respectable in the 1950s and '60s — he made the union's political endorsement a key component to anyone's election-year success.
Hall was responsible for the rise of the ILWU in Hawai'i, which gave workers on the waterfront and the plantations a strength they never had before. In the political revolution Hall led, labor could now confront management for the first time. One of his closest friends was Gov. John. A. Burns.
Hall was the union's Hawai'i regional director for 25 years.
He was born in 1915 in Ashland, Wis., but grew up in Southern California, where he graduated from high school during the Great Depression.
At 17, he became a merchant seaman. The job not only gave him his first glimpse of Hawai'i, but took him on a life-changing voyage to Asia. There he witnessed colonialism, poverty and racial inequality, and he vowed to improve the lives of working men and women.
Beginning in 1935, Hall left merchant ships in Honolulu several times so he could organize dockworkers. Often dressed in aloha shirts, he was a familiar face on the waterfront.
Among his core beliefs was that Hawai'i's labor unions would never succeed until they were interracial, and he pushed the concept.
Early on, Hall and his union convinced Hawai'i lawmakers to approve the Little Wagner Act of 1944. The law was an extension of the federal Wagner Act and formally gave Hawai'i plantation workers the right to organize.
He also led the bitter waterfront strike of 1949, which shut down the docks for six months. The territory had never experienced anything like it. Police were needed to escort nonstrikers to their jobs, walking them past union members armed with clubs.
Hall, who once belonged to the Communist Party, also gained notoriety as a member of the so-called "Hawaii Seven." They were arrested in 1951 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the government. They were convicted after a seven-month trial in 1953, but the convictions were overturned by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Hall left Hawai'i for the West Coast in 1969 to become the ILWU's vice president and director of organization.
When Hall died in San Francisco in 1971 after suffering a massive stroke, one Honolulu editorial writer said that "more than any other man, Hall helped bring industrial democracy to these Islands as they moved from feudalism and paternalism to the sophisticated and broadly affluent society of today."
