COMMENTARY
Unions have helped shape landscape — and could again
By John Griffin
Labor Day this year is inevitably tied to the Sept. 11 anniversary, our troubled economy, real or potential strikes (hotels, docks) and the politics of an election year.
Advertiser library photo • April 2001
But while those are all real concerns, we might also take time to think about American labor's roots, and especially how they changed Hawai'i for the better. I'll get to that.
Although strikes have become less common in Hawai'i, last year's teacher strike showed that organized labor is still a strong force here.
No doubt some liberal commentators will note that there are those, starting with the Bush administration, who would use the war on terrorism as a reason to limit labor rights and gains. At the least, those who generally decry union power and "decadence" might also acknowledge that those police and firefighter heroes of the World Trade Center disaster were strong union folks.
The national near-recession's impact on labor seems mixed. Union membership has been declining for decades as old industry fades and the U.S. economy changes. But hard times are again showing some unorganized workers the value of banding together, including in parts of Silicon Valley that often seemed immune to union organization.
Labor Day, a union creation that's 110 years old this year, will be observed and partly lost tomorrow in the complicated national and international picture.
In the world picture, the United States, with less than 14 percent of its work force in unions, is hardly a power. We may have the lowest union density in the so-called free world, below even places like Taiwan.
Many, if not most, other countries have a political Labor Party. That fell by the American wayside long ago, and today organized labor most often looks like an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. (Or some on the Forbes-magazine right would argue that's vice versa in these Islands.)
Whatever the case, labor — organized and otherwise — has made enormous contributions to our high standard of living, great production, and large measures of political and economic democracy. I am among those who feel that by providing a better and more reasonable alternative, the labor movement and its good works saved vital chunks of that free world from choosing communism when the Soviet Union and China were at their Cold War missionary peaks.
And that might even be true in a Hawai'i where, ironically, some top union leaders in the 1930s and '40s were Marxists and even members of the American Communist Party.
Advertiser library photo • 1946
Thus Hawai'i, as we always say, is a special place, and no more so than in labor matters.
Sugar workers' wives took part in a Labor Day parade through Hilo on the first day of the 1946 statewide plantation strike. Union membership has declined since then, but labor is still a powerful force in Hawai'i.
It's a long history that includes a first plantation strike (unsuccessful) in 1841, various efforts to form unions on a racial basis, the coming of craft unions (plumbers, bartenders, etc.), and starting in the 1930s, the successful organizing of the plantations and docks by the ILWU.
When I first came to work here and covered labor in the early 1950s, strikes were a lot more common, in sugar and pineapple, in the hotels, and among Teamster bus drivers. The scene is tame now, although last year the public school teachers and UH professors provided a taste of the old days.
Today, some 25 percent of the half-million-person-strong Hawai'i work force is organized. That share has been declining, but it's still ahead of all other states except New York, where it's 27 percent.
Labor and the Democrats in Hawai'i are not Siamese twins, but plenty of old bonds remain. Indeed, the 1954 social revolution that first brought the Democrats to power flowed in part from the earlier ILWU efforts on the plantations.
The departure of Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris (no labor favorite) from the Democratic governor's race added complications to an already clouded political picture for unions looking to remain true to their roots and to back a winner. That's especially so for the big public-sector unions, who are divided.
One keen labor observer suggested a lot of union problems this election would be solved if only Republican gubernatorial candidate Linda Lingle and untraditional Democrat Ed Case (of ABC "Anybody but Case" union slogans) would simply switch parties.
Still, if labor and the Democrats aren't always sharing the same sheets together, they are most often still in twin beds in the same room. After more than half a century, there's good reason for that, including the thought that Republicans (from the White House on down) most often lean hard toward big business backers.
Today, you can argue that Hawai'i's 1954 revolution has grown tired, dated and sometimes corrupt with too much power for too long. As I have written many times, we need a renaissance, be it provided by modern moderate Republicans or reform Democrats who have gotten beyond the old insular plantation mentality.
And no doubt unions themselves could use reforms. Some have to adapt to modernization and change, as the ILWU has done with the loss of plantations and mechanization of the docks.
Others have to go out more and sell themselves as providing quality services in a changing economy that includes lots of competition from nonunion workers. (The Carpenter's Union is doing some of that.) New frontiers like health care and some information technology have opened up.
Unions have to take their share of blame for what's gone wrong with Hawai'i, as do business, the media and the rest of us who claim to be independent. But organized labor, which we honor every first Monday of September, also deserves a large share of credit for what's been right about Hawai'i. Unions still have potential for spurring positive change.
Hawai'i labor history did not just happen. It was — and sometimes still is — a struggle.
And that's why people will be looking both back and forward in trying to decide how to vote this difficult and still-unclear election year.
John Griffin, a frequent contributor, is former editor of The Advertiser's editorial pages.
