The not-so-sweet story of how Filipino workers tried to take on Big Sugar in Hawaii
How can you win when the media, the public, and big business are against you?
When police searched the camp two days after the battle that killed 20 men, they found a note from strike leader Armando De Jesus urging workers to remain peaceful. The Higher Wage Movement could be lost, he warned, if they resorted to violence. And indeed it was.
Leaders of Filipino and Japanese sugar plantation strike first challenged the Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) in 1920. Their demands — an increase in daily wages and a shorter workday — were modest requests, intended to provide workers with some measure of financial security and dignity. But plantation owners refused to acknowledge the petitions, a move that incited the Filipino Piecemeal Sugar Strike in 1924. No other major strike in Hawaii’s history has ever been “so haphazardly planned and conducted or failed so completely,” writes John E. Reinecke in his 1992 history of the movement, The Filipino Piecemeal Sugar Strike of 1924–1925.
From the moment they began arriving en masse to work on Hawaii’s 45 sugar plantations, Filipinos were subject to both grueling labor for negligible pay and intense discrimination. Over the course of ten-hour days, they carried 75-pound bundles of cane that left raw, infected patches on their necks. Living in “barracks” on the plantation, sometimes with five men sharing a room only 10 feet square, their meager wages of 77 cents per day went straight back to company stores for basic necessities, making saving money to return home to the Philippines impossible. To earn a return ticket from their employer as a “bonus,” laborers had to work 720 days over three consecutive years.
The discrimination the Filipino immigrants faced in Hawaiian society was equally as crushing. “A great part of the population stereotyped them as hotheaded, knife-wielding, overdressed, sex-hungry young men,” writes Reinecke. By 1920, more than 10,000 Filipinos were employed cutting sugarcane — half the total population of Filipinos in the entire state — but most were single men with meager education and no professional or English language skills, making social mobility nearly impossible. The Hawaiian Filipino community as a whole included not one voter, juror, businessman, or individual of high status. According to Reinecke, “The 1924–1925 strike should probably be viewed as a social protest more than [an] … economic struggle.”
On the sugar plantations, the HSPA segregated ethnic groups. Unlike Japanese sugar plantation workers, Filipino laborers often lived in isolation, in bare camps with no temples, no language schools, no young men’s associations, and no community roots. While living conditions were marginally better among Japanese laborers than Filipino ones, both were subject to 10-hour workdays and wages of less than a dollar a day. Though tensions between the ethnic groups existed, by 1920 their shared plantation experience overshadowed their differences, and both communities threatened to strike if some basic demands, including an increase in wages from $0.77 to $1.25, an eight-hour workday, and overtime on holidays and Sundays, were not met. The demands were submitted to the HSPA in identical but separate petitions — one for the Japanese, one for the Filipinos. The HSPA rejected both.
On January 18, Filipino workers walked out of an Oahu plantation, followed two weeks later by Japanese workers. Over the six-month strike, in which around 2,600 FIlipino workers participated, the plantation owners worked hard to discredit labor leaders. The strike, claimed HSPA president John Waterhouse, was “an anti-American movement designed to obtain control of the sugar business of the Hawaiian Islands.” The primary Filipino labor leader, Pablo Manlapit, was accused of bribing a law firm for money in exchange for calling off the strike. In newspapers and posters, leaders from both ethnic groups were pictured in cartoons escaping the state with large sacks of money and riding around in fancy cars.
Perhaps most damaging to the movement was the HSPA’s allegation that one of the Japanese leaders of the strike, Noboru Tsutsumi, was not just working to secure better working conditions, but setting the stage for the Japanese to colonize the territory. Manlapit believed the rumor and immediately disassociated himself from his Japanese colleagues and called off the strike for Filipino laborers. By July 1920, Japanese strikers, too, had abandoned the movement. The HSPA had not met a single one of their demands.
After the failed 1920 strike, the Japanese Federation of Labor collapsed, but Manlapit, the first practicing Filipino lawyer in Hawaii, vowed to continue the struggle for his countrymen. Along with an AFL officer, George Wright, he established the High Wages Movement in 1922, with goals similar to those of the 1920 strike: an eight-hour workday for a minimum wage of $2 a day, overtime pay for Sundays and holidays, equal pay for men and women, increased pay for skilled labor, and the right to collective bargaining.
Filipino plantation laborers attended Wright and Manlapit’s meetings and signed their petitions, but organizing the group, which included speakers of three different dialects (Tagalog, Visayan, and Ilocano) on four separate islands (Oahu, Hawaii, Maui and Kauai), was a challenge. Over two years, they sent three separate petitions to the HSPA, none of which received a reply from the sugar plantation owners.
“The big strike of 1924 flowed like a slow-moving lava from April through September on the islands of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, Maui, and Kaua‘i,” writes Melinda Tria Kerkvliet in her 2002 biography of Manlapit, Unbending Cane. Manlapit ordered workers on Oahu to strike first; some 4,000 of them walked off of five of the island’s sugar plantations between April and May. For his efforts, Manlapit was charged with violating sanitation codes (for not providing workers with enough “water closets” at a strike camp leased under his name), libel, and conspiracy, for which he was arrested and briefly imprisoned.
According to Kerkvliet, Manlapit’s arrest may have “spurred many workers to join the strike” as it continued to spread from island to island. In July, around 1,000 workers left four plantations on the Big Island, and another 800 left two plantations on Maui. Finally, in August, around 300 strikers from two sugar plantations in Kauai walked out.
Though the last to strike and the smallest walkout of the four, the Kauai movement quickly went from peaceful to deadly. Strikers housed at a camp in Hanapepe were in close proximity to the Makaweli sugar plantation, at which only workers from the Visayan region of the Philippines joined the movement, while those from the Ilocos region stayed on the job. On September 8, two Ilocanos on their way to buy shoes were seized by the strikers and held against their will. Investigating police tried to intervene, but the strikers had frightened them into silence.
The following day, police returned with a group of 40 men, under the pretense of “arresting” the Ilocanos held hostage at the strike camp. The men were released into the custody of officials, but as they were leaving, shots were fired. Police captain Harry Oneha described the ensuing battle:
“We had a dozen rifles, five shotguns and some pistols in the posse, but some of the special deputies were unarmed. As we backed away trying to turn back to the enraged strikers they fired a volley at us. I don’t know who was the first man to fall. They were falling all around us.”
When it was over, what came to be known as the Hanapepe Massacre had killed 16 Filipinos and four policemen and wounded dozens of others. One hundred thirty were arrested.
After the battle, the strikes on Kauai and the other islands fell apart, and many participants were arrested or deported. Manlapit faced several charges, including conspiracy, and was sentenced to up to 10 years in jail, serving nearly three of them before being paroled and forcibly deported to California. The HSPA continued to make money hand over fist while exploiting the labor of its immigrant workers (though it did make some concessions, such as paying the medical expenses of its low-wage laborers, in 1925).
To observers and later historians, the failure of the High Wages Movement was inevitable. Not only were the odds against the strikers, but the leadership was detested by the government and the media, there was no headquarters and no real strategy, and the public had no sympathy for the movement. “To launch this strike, almost without preparation, was an act of irresponsibility,” writes Reinecke. “And these deaths, this suffering, appeared to be in vain, for the failure of the strike confirmed the Filipino community in its position of bottom dog in a firmly ruled, hierarchical, paternalistic plantation society.”
