414 pp. May 1985
ISBN 0-8248-0890-8P
Out of Print
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Keywords: |
Hawaii
textbook
history
sociology |
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Working in Hawaii: A Labor History
by Edward D. Beechert
Available on demand via Lightning Source, Inc.
"A very good labor history of Hawaii that has much to appeal to economic historians who are interested in 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. immigration history." --Journal of Economic History
This comprehensive overview of Hawaiian history takes as its focus the working conditions and quality of life of the common laborer. In Working in Hawaii, Edward D. Beechert has 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 took place. The European, and the American, brought with him tools, weapons, diseases, alcohol, religion, and money, the trappings of an antithetical culture that was to forever change Hawaii. Rich land, good weather, and apparently 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 and 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 the three distinct forms of government that served a monarchy, republic, and 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 workin conditions, was long and discouraging but ultimately successful to a degree unmatched in the sugar-producing world.
In order 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 poliy concerning labor, as well as details 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.
Edward D. Beechert, who received his Ph.D. from the University of California, teaches labor and economic history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has contiributed articles to numerous publications on labor history and is the author of Writing the Trade Union History of Hawaii.
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