Word: sugaring
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Harry Bridges' left-handed grip on Hawaii's sugar, pineapple and dock workers (TIME, Dec. 22) had never seemed tighter. He seemed coolly confident and was flexing his muscles for another wage fight with the planters and shippers next February. A vice president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, one J. R. Robertson, had gone out from San Francisco to stir up the shock troops and build up a $200,000 "war chest" (one day's pay a month from each of the I.L.W.U.'s 35,000 members...
...along the coastal slopes near Hilo, Vice President Robertson ran into trouble. Remembering their costly, 79-day strike of 1946, many sugar workers were bitter at Robertson's call for "an army of strikers." He lectured them sternly: their attitude that "the bosses are all right" was "dangerous thinking...
Last week Robertson's war talk blew up in his face. At a meeting in Hilo, 50 delegates representing about 4,000 sugar workers voted to secede from the I.L.W.U. and form an independent union...
Leader of the walkout was Amos Ignacio, a member of the territorial legislature and head of the I.L.W.U.'s Hawaiian division of sugar workers. Said he: "We've been smeared enough with Red paint. We have waited for a long time for a denial of Communistic activities by some of our biggest union bosses and we are sick of waiting. . . . We know there are Communists in the union...
...Bridges signed only 900 Hawaiian workers. But two years later, some 33,000 agricultural workers had joined his ranks. In a first test of strength he struck the sugar plantations, tied them up for 79 days, almost wrecked the industry by ordering his strikers not to maintain its vital irrigation system. His victory was small: he won an 18½?-an-hour increase, to which the owners had agreed a month before the end of the strike...