First Strike

• The first labor dispute, according to the University of Hawaii's Center for Labor Education and Research, occurred in 1841. Workers at a Koloa sugar plantation, the first such plantation in the state, walked off their jobs in a strike to try to increase their wages 25 cents a day. The strike was unsuccessful, and it caused even more problems for future workers. Plantation owners, angered by the strike and the lack of labor on the island, reacted by searching for more workers from other islands.
  
  

Sugar Power

• Hawaiian sugar plantation owners, which owned the largest five companies on the islands, brought in workers from Asia and the Pacific. From 1841 to 1898, sugar growers brought in 46,000 Chinese, 126,000 Filipinos and 180,000 Japanese, followed by Puerto Ricans and Portuguese. When a certain immigrant population asked for more wages and benefits, another immigrant population was brought in to replace it at a lower wage.
  
  

Masters and Servants Act

• The five major Hawaiian sugar plantation companies, which were owned by Alexander & Baldwin Ltd., American Factors Ltd., Castle & Cooke Ltd., C. Brewer & Co. Ltd. and Theo H. Davies Co. Ltd., used contracts for their immigrant labor forces that were similar to military contracts. Adding to the problem, the labor contracts were protected under the Master and Servants Act, which stated that immigrants who refused to work would be forced by police to work twice the labor, causing resentment.
  
  

Mainland Influence

• Two years after Hawaii's annexation into the United States in 1898, workers from the mainland U.S. began to seek work in Hawaii, which led to native workers and immigrants leaving the plantations for the Hawaii's larger mainland cities. Plantations continued to use less-skilled workers at much lower rates, while native Hawaiians and immigrants, influenced by the mainland workers, began striking for higher wages and benefits.
  
  

First Union

• The first union to form in Hawaii, shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1935 Wagner Act legalized union organization, was the International Longshoreman and Warehouseman's Union. The new union represented sugar, pineapple and longshore workers on every island of Hawaii, but the big five companies continued to fight. In 1949, the ILWU went on strike for six months, and the stalemate caused Hawaii's worst economic crisis up until that time. It took five years for the five major companies to lose their power on the unions, but strikes such as the one in 1949 led the way for more labor unions to successfully organize.