A Matter of Motive

In front of a pale green building on Honolulu's Kapiolani Boulevard one day last week, a band of ukuleles and a bass fiddle plunked out a rhythmic island tune. In the midday sun, languid, aloha-shirted islanders meandered back and forth along the sidewalk carrying their signs, pausing now and then for a swig of pineapple juice or to chat with a passerby. The occasion was neither a luau nor a festival, but the visible evidence of the first strike in more than 100 years of Hawaiian newspaper publishing history.

In its third week, the seven-union walkout led by the Newspaper Guild against the morning Advertiser and afternoon Star-Bulletin, Hawaii's only two island-wide dailies, has become a contest of wills between hardheaded Financier Chinn Ho, who dominates both papers, and Jack Hall, the tough boss of militant unionism in the islands. At first the unions wanted an across-the-board pay raise of $10 a week. The publishers offered a sliding scale downward from $3.50. The gap narrowed to the point where there was only $2.75 separating their positions. But negotiations broke down, and the strike was on. Ho, the Oriental bank messenger who became a millionaire in real estate, said that management had not even had time to present its final offer.

There were obviously issues that never got to the bargaining table. Mainland-born Hall, who sailed to Hawaii in 1935, teamed up with West Coast Labor Boss Harry Bridges and now presides over a diminishing domain of plantation and dock workers, has been looking for a way to organize Hawaii's white-collar workers. With a small unit of his own union controlling some circulation-department workers and with the Guild seeking his counsel, Hall urged the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin employees to strike, and told them how to do it. Last week Hall spelled out his purpose frankly. The strike, he said, "will give the impetus to organization of many more white-collar workers here."

Charging that this kind of talk proves that the motive for the strike has little to do with dollars and cents, Ho said he would hold out against the unions for six months if necessary. But at week's end Realist Ho was back at the bargaining table with the unions just in case a quick settlement was possible.

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