AAPI racism and discrimination– unions a model of collective resistance
The appalling rise in hate crimes targeting Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) people, since ex-President Trump employed demagogic, racist rhetoric to deflect criticism of his abysmal record on confronting the Covid-19 pandemic, has forced overdue calls for a reckoning on the long history of AAPI racism in the U.S.
AAPI discrimination and assaults have always been met with AAPI organizing and resistance, from community activism, to legal campaigns, to labor militancy.
Unions with AAPI members and leadership, despite for many years facing racism and exclusion from a significant part of the early labor movement, have been at the forefront of defending the rights of AAPI workers, to the benefit of all workers and communities
Many Chinese workers, mainly seeking economic opportunity, first came to the U.S. in the mid-19th century, typically restricted to the lowest paid, most strenuous jobs, frequently in dangerous conditions, as Western miners, lumber, farm, factory, and railroad workers.
Exploited by employers, resented by white workers, they faced discrimination in wages, working conditions, and unlike white workers often had to pay for their lodging, food, and tools.
In 1867, a group of Chinese workers grading and digging tunnels in the high Sierra mountains laid down their tools and went on a strike that only ended when the Central Pacific Railroad blocked food and other necessities for the thousands of Chinese workers in the camps where they lived.
But the strike was a signal of rebellion, and a preview of what would be repeated in actions for decades to come by AAPI construction, agricultural, cannery, garment, and healthcare workers, in particular, with broad AAPI community support.
Hawaiian AAPI workers have been prominent in labor history.
In 1920, amid the Spanish flu pandemic, an ominous reminder of dangerous conditions facing workers this past year, 8,300 workers, mostly members of the Filipino American Filipino Labor Union and the Japanese American Federation of Japanese Labor, struck for improved pay and paid maternity leave.
The growers evicted 12,000 people from plantation homes, causing them to shelter in crowded living conditions in strike sympathizer’s homes, tent cities, empty buildings and churches. The epidemic made that even more perilous, some 2,000 were infected with the flu virus, 150 died. The strike lasted six months, but the workers ultimately won a 50 percent pay raise.
In 1946, during the biggest strike wave in U.S. history as workers sought to recover from a World War II mandated wage freeze, a massive, multi-racial strike across Hawaii of tens of thousands of Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Portuguese workers, led by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, shut down 33 of 34 island sugar plantations. After 79 days, the workers won wage, health, pension gains, and a shorter work week. The strike had an enormous social and political impact on Hawaii, and transformed the islands to become what remains today the most unionized state in the U.S.
California also has a proud history of AAPI agricultural organizing. In 1934, the newly formed Filipino Labor Union led a strike of 7,000 workers in the Salinas lettuce fields seeking better pay and working conditions. Though broken by vigilante and police racism, it led to greater days to come in California’s influential agricultural industry.
Fruits of that organizing could be seen in one of the most famous labor fights of the past century, the Delano, CA table grape strike.
It was launched in 1965 by the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, sparked by Filipino American, former cannery organizer Larry Itliong, which forged unity with the Mexican farmworkers led by Cesar Chavez to create the United Farm Workers and its highly effective strategies of marches, hunger strikes, and an international grape boycott. The U.S. Constitution, noted Itliong, “said that everybody has equal rights and justice. You’ve got to make that come about. They are not going to give it to you.”
The National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards, whose highly diverse membership was 25 percent AAPI, was legendary in the labor movement and wider community for its opposition to discrimination, militancy, and advocacy for all its members and racial, gender, and LGBTQ justice. A sign in the union headquarters read “No redbaiting, no race-baiting, no queen-baiting,” and the union re-wrote its constitution to demand that “race is no longer pitted against race in the struggle for jobs” and to affirm the “equality of opportunity for work and education and for the essential values of life to all people.”
The garment industry has long been dominated by immigrant and domestic women of color. In New York’s Chinatown in 1982, 20,000 mostly immigrant Chinese women, and their union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, successfully defeated garment factory owners demands for sweeping health and benefit takeaways and attempts to break their union.
Healthcare, especially nursing, is another leading sector with large AAPI representation making up 72 percent of the healthcare workforce in Hawaii, 26 percent in California, and 19 percent in Nevada. AAPI staff were disproportionately harmed by the corporate and government failures to ensure Covid-19 pandemic safety measures; though just 4 percent of the national registered nurse workforce, Filipina RNs account for nearly a third of the Covid-19 deaths, according to National Nurses United.
Filipina nurses have been a bulwark of RN union strength, especially within NNU, where RNs, notably in California and Nevada, have been key leaders and activists in organizing, collective bargaining campaigns, and strikes, pressing for pay equity, especially for immigrant nurses with their U.S. born colleagues, better healthcare coverage and pensions, and improved patient care conditions, especially safe staffing. NNU members have also spoken out against AAPI discrimination and racism.
In 2007, Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, was elected President of the California Nurses Association, the Filipina leader of a major U.S. union. She has also been an outspoken advocate of racial and worker justice, including in response to the spate of AAPI hate crimes.
“Challenging and tearing down the racist systems that undergird our entire society, and rebuilding one that is equitable, just, and treats all people humanely, is daunting and tons of work. But it is quite doable,” Triunfo-Cortez has said. “As union nurses, we do it every day at our workplaces, in the halls of Congress, and in our communities through our collective voice and power. When we organize together, it is possible to create a world where all people are valued as individual human beings, and I and other nurses will never stop fighting for that goal.”
