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FM: In the case of the canneries, the contractors were guaranteed a certain amount, let's say twenty thousand dollars for the season, and they were to supply labor within that allotment. And they could do so, if you... if as in my case, for example, I started off with a low-paying job of eighty dollars per month for two months, $160. If you consider that, let's say two hundred dollars could be given to fifty workers, well, that's ten thousand dollars... correct, isn't it? And then you have, if the... then you have ten thousand dollars left over for other kinds of costs as well as the profit to the contractor. That's what you would call the minimum. Then, beyond the basic guarantee, the contractor is allotted so much for surplus, whatever production exceeds the basic, let's say, forty thousand cases, or whatever that is agreed to. Given that situation then, the contractors are in a position of cheating on the laborers if they wanted to, or they tried to, by, by reducing the amount of pay that they would give as much as possible, and also by, by limiting the living conditions which they would offer or supply to the workers, and so on. So there is an area here of fraud and undesirable, unethical behavior on the part of the employer, the contractor, that gave the contractors, in many situations, a bad name. Part of the problem was that they could advance money to these workers before they went to Alaska, and then once in Alaska, especially if they had bad habits such as gambling and so on so that they would use up money more rapidly than they earned it, they had, in a sense, a kind of a slave labor condition created with respect to these workers.

My experience was that I never ran into anything of this kind. The contractors were honest as far as I could tell, they... and I think in many ways they had, they needed to be if they wanted to have a relatively stable supply of workers summer after summer. Now how do you get a stable supply of workers for a seasonal job? You do so by tackling people who have need for summer employment. And the Nisei were particularly suitable for that kind of a situation because Nisei were, especially at that time, students in school. They are let out for summer jobs and they need summer jobs. The Filipinos, who were immigrants in the early 19... 20th century, often were working in other jobs at, relatively low paying jobs, and the attraction of the salmon cannery to them was that... well, back up a moment. There were among the Filipinos, also students, like ourselves, young people who were attending school and needed money in the same fashion that we did. But in addition to that, many of the Filipino workers were those engaged in low-paying jobs elsewhere, whether it was dishwashing or domestic work, whatever, or farm labor, or even less so in industries like railroad and sawmill. In any case, they were often engaged in, at the early stage of their immigration, in relatively low-paying jobs and therefore, when it came to the, considering the offer from cannery contractors, working for them at a relatively good savings possibility, they then turned to that frequently in, as a labor supply. So, these conditions, then, created the condition, circumstance where contractors were able to supply these packing houses with the kind of labor that they wanted, relatively cheap labor who would, however, be relatively stable over summer after summer, and could carry on the canning work that was required in these enterprises.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.