When it came to labor relations with the ILWU and its powerful boss, Jack Hall, it was said that Hawai'i had mellowed in the years immediately after statehood.

Hall, whose best years as a blunt, bare-fisted organizer were behind him, was at the height of his power. He had made his International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union a respected institution. Lawmakers who had once loathed it now sought the union's political endorsement. And his close friend, John A. Burns, was governor.

Such labor peace was the product of years of hard-fought class struggle, bitter strikes and militant defiance of the status quo.

Hall was never a man to back away from a union fight, but he was also an intelligent and skilled negotiator. He was always a man of controversy, but he also was a man of his word.

Hall started organizing workers in Hawai'i in 1935. He took them to the heights of solidarity. Under Hall, they waged a waterfront strike in 1949 that shut down the territory to the outside world. It was unlike anything Hawai'i had ever experienced.

The same could be said of Hall.

When he left Hawai'i for the West Coast in 1969 to become ILWU's vice president and director of organization, he was praised as someone whose contributions to Hawai'i were beyond measure.

An editorial stated that "more than any other man, Hall brought industrial democracy to the Islands as they moved from feudalism and paternalism to the sophisticated and broadly affluent society of today."

Hall died in January 1971 and his contributions were fondly recalled from every point on the political compass. A few days later, in a tribute felt across Hawai'i, 64,000 union men and women stopped work for 15 minutes.