Research Catalog

Title

Working in Hawaii : a labor history / Edward D. Beechert.

Author

Beechert, Edward D.

Publication

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, ©1985.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 401 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"This comprehensive overview of Hawaiian history focuses on the common laborer's working conditions and quality of life. In Working in Hawaii, Edward D. Beechert traced an evolution in the economic environment that progressed from the ancient Hawaiian communal society based on subsistence agriculture to the complex capitalistic economy of the present. The book concentrates on the last 200 years when the most rapid and profound changes in the working environment occurred. The Europeans, and the Americans, brought with them tools, weapons, diseases, alcohol, religion, and money, the trappings of an antithetical culture that was to change Hawaii forever. Rich land, good weather, an abundant labor force, and an exclusive American market appealed to enterprising investors. To support their ambitions to turn a Hawaiian society based on a subsistence economy into a Western industrial one based on plantation agriculture, entrepreneurs introduced the concept of private property. They supported it with a Western legal system. Foreign labor was imported from Asia when the dwindling Hawaiian population could no longer meet the plantations' growing need for a constant supply of cheap labor. Beechert maintains that the workers, far from being victims of this economic transition, took advantage of the growing employment opportunities and made significant contributions to the development of the Hawaiian economy, notably the sugar industry. As the Island economy progressed, the laborers confronted conditions unlike those of agricultural workers elsewhere. They worked under three distinct forms of government that served a monarchy, a republic, and a colonial territory. Their status ranged from that of indentured penal contract laborers to that of free wage laborers protected by the U. S. Constitution. The struggle for dignity, as important to the workers as the battle for decent wages and working conditions, was long and discouraging but ultimately successful to a degree unmatched in the sugar-producing world. To put the history of labor in the Hawaiian islands in an expanded historical perspective, the author discusses a record of labor legislation, law enforcement, and public policy concerning labor, as well as details on how workers organized and formed modern unions. By consulting a wide range of documentary sources, including plantation records, business memoranda, union files, legislation, labor contracts, court documents, newspaper items, and public speeches, Beechert has made this the most complete history of labor in Hawaii to date. Scholars and students of labor history, sociological change, and Hawaiiana should also appreciate the extensive bibliography" -- Dust jacket.

Subjects

• Plantation life
• Labor unions
• Foreign workers
• Working class
• History
• Hawaii
• Arbeiders
• Plantation life > Hawaii > History
• Labor unions > Hawaii > History
• Foreign workers > Hawaii > History
• Working class > Hawaii > History

Genre/Form

History

Note

• Includes index.

Bibliography (note)

• Bibliography: p. [375]-387.

Contents

Ancient Hawaii -- From communal member to laborer -- The contract labor system -- The plantation worker: 1850-1876 -- The industrial plantation: 1876-1900 -- Freedom from contract -- The urban worker -- Labor unrest -- The paternalistic plantation: a new form of control -- The dual union strike of 1920 -- Ethnic unionism and the struggle for maturity -- The work force and welfare capitalism -- The workers organize -- The end of isolation -- Creating a permanent labor movement.

ISBN

• 0824808908
• 9780824808907

LCCN

• 85008640
• ZBWT00016191

OCLC

• ocm12104128
• 12104128
• SCSB-637431

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library