When Jack Hall died, flags were flown at half-staff throughout Hawaii, longshoremen closed the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego for 24 hours, and thousands of other workers in Hawaii and along the west coast of the United States and Canada also stopped work to show their respect. For, though largely unheralded now, Jack Hall was one of America's greatest labor leaders.

He was director of organization for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and one of its two vice presidents when a stroke killed him in 1971 at age 55 in San Francisco. But it was not what he had done during the previous 18 months in the drafty, run-down headquarters presided over by the legendary Harry Bridges that made Hall extraordinary.

Rather, it was what he had done before that in Hawaii where he served for more than a quarter-century as the ILWU's regional director -- the key leader in bringing industrial democracy to Hawaii, in transforming Hawaii from virtually a feudalistic territory controlled by a few huge financial interests into a modern pluralistic state in which workers and their unions have a major voice.

"I don't think there has been any single individual in the last 30 years who has made a more substantial contribution to our political, social and economic life," then-Gov. John Burns of Hawaii said of Hall. He credited him "for the full flowering of democracy in our islands."

Hall's career closely paralleled the development of U.S. unions during his lifetime. Like the unions, Hall started out during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a powerless outsider, but ended up just three decades later as a powerful member of the Establishment. He became an insider who could draw praise, not only from union members and working people generally, but also from some of the same employers who once attacked him as a "communist agitator," while at the same time arousing the suspicions of young people and others who felt he might have moved too close to his former enemies.

Hall, the son of a miner, had signed on as a merchant seaman -- the only job he could find -- immediately after graduating from a Southern California high school in 1932. He landed in Hawaii four years later, a tall, skinny 22-year-old whose glimpses of incredible poverty in the Far East had sickened and angered him and, he later recalled, "determined which side of the fence I was on." Striking longshoremen at Port Allen had asked the Sailors Union for help, and the union sent Hall.

He applied lessons he had learned while taking part in the waterfront strike led three years earlier in San Francisco by Bridges, quickly emerging as a leader in getting the Hawaiian longshoremen at least some measure of the union recognition that had been won in San Francisco and other West Coast ports in 1934. He was a principal leader, too, in the later attempts by the ILWU to organize the sugar and pineapple plantations that dominated Hawaii's economy.

The odds were heavily against the organizers. Virtually all phases of life in what was then the Territory of Hawaii were controlled by five extremely powerful holding companies, popularly known as "the Big Five," that owned most of the territory's arable land. As the ILWU's official history notes, they "followed policies designed to keep labor as powerless - economically and politically - as the serfs on medieval feudal baronies."

Workers, carefully segregated by racial and ethnic groups, lived in company housing on the big sugar and pineapple plantations where they worked, bought their food and clothing in company stores there, and had little choice but to do exactly what the boss told them to do, at pay of less than 50 cents an hour.

The tightly unified employers crushed organizing efforts by pitting worker against worker. They purposely employed workers of as many different nationalities as possible on each plantation -- Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Rican and others -- and, the ILWU said, "by unequal treatment, discriminatory pay scales, separate housing areas and subtle propaganda they stimulated racial suspicion." Thus when workers "were finally forced by their misery to organize into unions, they made the tragic mistake of following racial lines."

The strike was the only weapon available to the workers. But when workers of a particular nationality struck to demand union rights, they'd be replaced immediately with workers of another nationality.

Hall talked with the workers endlessly about the obvious need to bring them together in a single union, often in meetings that were held in secret, outside the closely guarded plantations. He stressed the basic message of working class solidarity, telling the workers over and over that they could not achieve the unified strength necessary to combat exploitation by employers if they continued to remain apart because of racial and ethnic differences.

"Know your class," Hall told them, "and be loyal to it."

Hall proved his case in a strike by Filipino longshoremen at the port of Ahukoni in 1938. The ships the Filipinos normally loaded and unloaded were diverted to Port Allen, where most of the longshoremen were Japanese, on the assumption that the Japanese would work on the ships. But they didn't. They became the first racial group in Hawaii to support strikers of another race.

It was a very important start, but only a start. Most workers remained skeptical. It was no great chore to persuade workers who did onerous hand labor for so little pay that they were being mistreated, but convincing them to trust the organizers who insisted that they cross the racial and ethnic lines that had long divided them was extremely difficult. But Hall, a tough, plainspoken, hard-drinking man who made his rounds of the plantations in an ancient beat-up sedan, eventually won them over with his simple and direct approach and an obvious honesty that was to have as great an impression on employers and politicians in later years.

Even one of Hall's chief enemies in those days, the Honolulu Advertiser, acknowledged after his death, "There was no sham or pretense in him. He was absolutely honest. He never lied. He never slanted things. He never shaded the truth."

The ILWU won its first victory in 1938 - a union contract at a pineapple plantation on Kauai. But the crucial breakthrough came later that year when the ILWU formed a political organization, the Kauai Progressive League, to elect a pro-labor candidate to the Territorial Senate against an incumbent who also happened to manage a sugar plantation.

Victories in other elections followed, and by 1944 the League became so strong Hall was able to write and lobby through the Legislature a "Little Wagner Act." It granted Hawaii's farmworkers the formal rights to unionization that are guaranteed most non-agricultural workers under the federal Wagner Act but still denied most farmworkers outside the islands.

The ILWU followed the victory with a massive organizing drive, but was tested almost immediately, in 1946, when it waged a 79-day strike to demand union contracts from sugar plantation owners. Similar showdowns came in 1947 for pineapple workers and in 1949 for longshoremen. The struggle was often brutal. Several organizers were beaten by thugs presumably hired by employer interests, and there was an attempt on Hall's life. But the ILWU came through it all intact and strengthened.

The union's political muscles also grew -- so much so that, in 1946, Hall and his colleagues led an election campaign that broke 50 consecutive years of Republican control in Hawaii's legislature.

The plantation owners and their Republican allies struck back by labeling Hall and other ILWU leaders as subversive radicals. The Federal Government backed them by attempting to convict Hall of conspiring with six officers of the tiny Hawaiian Communist Party to violate the Smith Act by advocating, in that familiar phrase of the McCarthyite 1950s, "the overthrow of the government by force and violence."

Hall refused to answer specific questions about Communist Party membership, spoke proudly of his youthful radicalism, discussed his later belief that "socialism isn't practical" - and was found guilty along with the six others in 1953, fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment, the maximum penalty under the law. Hall remained free while ILWU members conducted an intensive -- and expensive -- campaign to overturn the conviction. Finally, five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court granted their appeal, agreeing that Hall's constitutional rights had been violated.

There were strikes and other disputes after that, but never again was Hall's standing or that of the union seriously challenged. The ILWU assumed a commanding position in Hawaii's economic life. And it became the most important political force in the islands, forming a coalition with the Democratic Party that gave the union as much influence as the employers' Big Five had exerted previously through the Republican Party..

It was a rare politician who was elected without ILWU backing and, as a consequence, the government and legislative programs in Hawaii became among the most worker-oriented and progressive anywhere in the fields of health, education, welfare, labor and social services. The state's political leadership became the most racially and ethnically mixed in the world.

Hall became a highly prominent figure in civic as well as economic and political affairs. He was appointed to the Honolulu Police Commission and other mayoral and gubernatorial bodies and led Community Chest, United Fund and similar decidedly non-radical activities. Hall even won praise from the business community, editorial writers and other conservative interests for what one management spokesman called "highly responsible leadership and unquestioned integrity," while getting his usual praise from workers who cited the same traits.

Hall's ability to please both sides was perhaps best shown in his approach to mechanization. The ILWU, in a decision later made by the union in all West Coast ports as well, decided after World War II that it would not fight the introduction of job-stealing machinery in Hawaii. Hall and his members, longshoremen and plantation workers alike, reasoned that work should be as easy and efficient as possible - as long as there were special benefits for workers who might have to step aside for streamlined equipment that could do their jobs faster and better.

Increased pensions were offered workers who would take early retirement, but the major tool was an employer-financed "repatriation fund" that paid older workers - most of them Filipinos - up to $2,500 plus transportation costs if they would choose to return home. Many had long wanted to return, but had never made enough money to do so.

By 1960, the plantation workforce was cut to 9,000, about half its pre-war size. At the same time, hand labor was virtually eliminated. No longer were there gangs of workers wielding machetes and carrying loads of sugarcane and pineapples on their backs. Specially designed bulldozers and cranes were brought in to do the heavy work. Because there were fewer of them and because the machinery enabled them to produce more, Hawaii's farmworkers became - and remain - far and away the country's most highly compensated. Other farmworkers continue to toil in poverty, while the Hawaiian workers earn wages comparable to those of non-farm workers and benefits unknown on most farms - medical and dental care, sick leave, paid holidays and vacations, pensions, overtime and severance pay, unemployment insurance and even, in some cases, a 40-hour workweek.

Plantation and longshore workers still are the backbone of the ILWU in Hawaii, but Hall long ago led the union into just about every industry in the islands. Bakers, factory workers, automobile salesmen, supermarket clerks and a wide variety of other workers, especially including hotel workers and others in Hawaii's ever-expanding tourist industry - all carry union cards. It's their guarantee of economic and political rights and rewards, of dignity and self-respect and the chance to determine their own destinies, of an effective voice on the job and in their communities, of fair and equal treatment their forebears could only dream of.

Jack Hall left a truly remarkable legacy.

Copyright © Dick Meister