Revolt in the Canebrakes

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).

But 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."

Then Bridges' men got another blow. George Aguiar, a member of the legislature from the island of Kauai, resigned from the territorial Democratic Party, charged that its control on Kauai was in the hands of I.L.W.U. straw bosses. He joined Ignacio's revolt.

The secession caught the I.L.W.U.'s leftist leaders in Hawaii by surprise. Jack Hall, Bridges' lieutenant in Hawaii, was in San Francisco, presumably talking strike strategy with his boss. Union organizers scampered to Hilo, tried to persuade the 4,000 secessionists to reconsider their stand. But at week's end the rebels were standing firm, and the revolt in the canebrakes threatened to spread. If it did, Harry Bridges might be in for an entirely different sort of war from the one he had planned for Hawaii.

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