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Chinese and Japanese of small means banded together in huis (syndicates), pooling their resources and promoting business enterprises. A former social service worker, Hung Wai Ching, organized his friends and swung a $320,000 deal to acquire Honolulu's gaudy Lau Yee Chai nightclub. With Ruddy Tongg, one of the most successful of the new promoters. Hung has recently started Transpacific Air Lines (inter-island). Ruddy Tongg owns a printing and publishing business in Oahu and cattle ranches on Hawaii. Chin Ho, another Chinese, organized the company which purchased the Waianae sugar plantation on Oahu.
Even before the war, the Big Five no longer dominated the merchandising field. Piggly Wiggly, Sears, Roebuck and others had moved in. Now Pan American and United Air Lines finished cracking the transport monopoly once enjoyed by the Big Five's Matson steamship line. More visitors were arriving in Hawaii by air than by sea. But the Big Five still supplies most of the direction and driving power for the islands' economy.
The Word from the West Coast. Inevitably, the islands' growth and boom brought labor troubles. There had been occasional strikes of workers before the war, but none had been very effective. Compared with conditions in many a U.S. mining town, living conditions were good; the benevolently paternal Big' Five provided free housing and free medical service, the climate was salubrious. Then came Harry Bridges, the crow-beaked, fellow-traveling boss of the West Coast longshoremen, bearing another kind of gospel to Hawaii.
In 1944, 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.
Last July he tried again, in the pineapple fields. This time he lost, hands down. Hawaiian laborers, who are among the best-paid agricultural labor in the world (average wage: $8.10 a day), did not want to lose 40 to 50 days of peak seasonal employment. Bridges called the strike off after five days. The incident illustrated the paradoxical weakness in Bridges' position. He could cripple the islands' limited economy, or he could starve the islands with a longshoremen's strike. But in the process the workers would hurt themselves.
The New Gloom. The threat of Bridges' union, locally run by a well-trained leftist named Jack Hall, was certainly there, however. And although the Japanese laborers showed little evidence of revolutionary zeal, many businessmen thought they saw more than the threat of a strike; they saw Communism stalking the cane-brakes and the pineapple fields.
For those reasons, some rock-ribbed conservatives such as wealthy, 72-year-old Walter Dillingham oppose statehood. Said one of them: "In view of world uncertainties and the attempt at outside control of our local affairs, this is not the time for us to cut loose from federal control."
For the same reasons some of them take a very dubious view of statehood's energetic champion, Delegate Joseph Farrington.