Cannery Union

“The salmon canneries, like the California grape growers, were resistant to making changes for their migrant workforce. Since its earliest days in the late 1800s, the salmon industry has depended on an abundant supply of cheap labor that could be deployed at a moment’s notice, or discharged if the salmon run was weak. The workers had to be willing to do grueling work under harsh conditions; they had to be dependable but expendable. Asian immigrants, a captive workforce with a tenuous status in America, were considered ideal and preferable to Native Alaskans, who could easily leave the canneries for home if conditions became intolerable...."

In the late 1930s, Chinese, Japanese and Filipino immigrant and Asian American cannery workers attempted to develop a unit front, but the union broke down with changes in the salmon industry and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. “In its place, ethnic-specific unions competed. Because Filipinos were the main source of the cannery labor pool, their labor organizations, run by Filipino officers, emerged as the most powerful.”

Quoted in Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of An American People (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), pp. 144-146. (Photo courtesy of Fel Cacdac)