| OCR Text |
Show The signal today reads full speed ahead for the resettlement of loyal ev cuees of Japanese ancestry. The stress today is on individual relocatlion, so that evacuee manpo\rer will be available to help avert ~ha l gr.owing shortage of t ined, skilled workmen in industries vital to the successful prosecution of the r. · One of the question marks faced by the mA • s present program of work relocation is the attitude of organized labor, or that wing of it represented by the American Federation of Labor. Already in some intermountain states, there have been isolated instances of union discrimination against evacuee workers, discrimination resulting in most instances from misinformation on ~acuation and the evacuee, although it is true tha~ many old-line AFL unions still d w the ••c olor-line" aga~nst non-Caucasian worker's. The trade union movement is a dynamic force for the extension of democratic practices in America. Evacuee Americans remember 'that, in the midst of wolfcries for restrictions against Japanese Americans, the California AFL smashed an attempt of one of its locals to railroad a resol_ution which would have placed the state organization behind the moyement to revoke the citizenship of all American-born Japanese. And the nisei ~~11 not soon forget the California State CIO's stirring argument for justice for American-born Japanese, delivered by its state secretary before the Tol an committee. Historically, since the arrival .of the first Japanese laborers to a frontier America crying for additional manpower, organ i ~ed labor has had, i n effect a "Japanese problem. " The first recorded act of violence committed against the Japanese i mmigrant worker by an organi zed group occurred in 1890, when 15 Japanese cobqlers, employed in a San Francisco shoe factory, vrere attacked by members of the shoemakers' union and forced to quit their jobs. Since that day in 1890 these immigrant Japanese and their descendants have always been on the fringe of the labor movement. The Tolan Committee's interim report notes that California ' s fi rst legislative recognition of the presence of Japanese i mmi grants was given i n 1901, when the State Legislature passed a resolution aski ng congress t o protect· native labor by restricting Japanese immigration . It was during this period that_ AFL unions, whose membership was at that time restricted to workmen in the skilled trades, wrote special anti-Oriental clauses into their constitutions . Some of these anti-Oriental provisions are being applied even today. In the infant years or the t·entieth _century, powerful western employer groups encouraged the recruiting of Orientals, -especially Japanese, and the impact of this fresh, eager supply of human energy upon the western lahor market served to antagonize native white labor. Coast labor interpret·ed the arrival of the boatloads of Japanese immigrants as a definite threat to their future security and organized into strong units to resist this new and alien force. The roots of that antagonism were threaded firmly and deeply in California and have never been eradicated. Employer utilization of labor in racial units, the resistance encountered from white labor organizations, the lack of a common language and a variety of other factors combined to separate the Japanese from organized workers. The Japanese operated independently as a racial group in the agricultural industry, in which the majority ·were employeq.. The . .La, 2 Fol~et~a -; comm~ttee pointed out that, like the Chinese, the Japanese followed the practice of organizing themselves into gangs under the direction of a boss ·or contractor, "providing their own food and housing at work, and lj_vi,ng apart from the employer, the regular white labor force, and the migratory white laborer." |
