<Begin Segment 5>

AI: Um.. let's see. Perhaps you were going to say a bit more about the Japanese contractors --

FM: Yeah.

AI: -- and their way of setting up --

FM: Yes.

AI: -- the payments?

FM: Japanese contractors were well-established business people in the community and were highly regarded as so, and yet, on the other hand, they often had a bad name associated with their work. For one thing, contractors are people who are recruiting large supplies of other people of their own kind, Japanese Issei or Nisei, or when more extended, Filipinos and other groups. And because these are people, the employees are people who are not well-established, it is possible for the contractors to take great advantage of... unfair advantage of the workers. Now, in my experience, for example, with the Nagamatsu family, I never experienced anything adverse. And I don't recall that, ever hearing complaints about the contractors, but there were stories in the earlier years especially, of how contractors -- who were hiring Issei because, who were available because they were gamblers and so on -- would take advantage of these people by advancing money to them, getting them to gamble and lose all their money so as to be sure that they would come back the next year and so on. There were all kinds of stories of this kind of fraudulent or unethical behavior that the contractors were alleged to engage in. Also it was said that the contractors were making money by saving as much as possible on the employee payments and support that they were rendering for, supplying, and of taking off money for themselves. Again, I think this a rather unfair picture of what the contractors were like. They were certainly business people and trying to economize as much as possible, but on the other hand, they were doing so without being, to my, in my experience, unfairly or excessively greedy or excessively penurious in what they were doing. So, I personally never thought of the contractors as an altogether undesirable group of people. But, if one takes the view that contractors reflected potentially the uglier side of capitalism, why, that is... well, then there was the possibility that the contractors might be seen in this light.

In any event, what the contractors did was to work out with the packing, the American packing companies, contracts themselves, such as that they would receive, they would contract for the payment of, base payment of fifty cents per case of salmon, with a guaranteed minimum payment for forty thousand cases. In other words, fifty cents per case, forty thousand cases, twenty thousand, twenty thousand dollars would be available as base promise, guarantee to the contractor, with which he was to go out and hire however many workers as he could get, fifty perhaps, or even a hundred in some larger canneries. And then, if the pack exceeded forty thousand, let us say, hundred thousand sometimes, or as happened, in record packs two hundred thousand, they could save money beyond what was promised as the base guarantee.

Now the first year I went to Alaska, when I was fourteen years of age, we packed no more than ten thousand cases. And obviously, the company lost money substantially, since their base guarantee was forty thousand cases. When we packed only ten thousand cases it was a great loss, and in fact, this happened two years running. Alaska had very poor salmon runs in the year, the years when I started, 1927, '28. And the companies lost heavily. And the Japanese contractors, under those circumstances, made very little money. They might make three thousand dollars, let us say, but the rest of it went out in payment for covering, covering labor costs and so on. And unless they were cheating on all this, I don't think of the contractors as necessarily having been a undesirable group of people.

Contracting, by another standard, is again, not a desirable arrangement particularly from the standpoint of labor unionization. Contractors are an alternative with independent capacity for rake-offs of a kind that should actually or ethically be allotted to, let us say, the workers. And in this point, from this point of view, contracting, again, might be seen as an undesirable kind of arrangement. However, if you look at it from the standpoint of the stage of development of the industry, or of the community, contractors, in a sense, were a necessary part of the scene, especially for Japanese immigrants, coming, let us say in 1900 or 1910, with no experience in the American life and no capacity for speaking the language and so on. You needed someone like the contractor, who would intervene and provide jobs for you. So, I don't think of the contractors as necessarily a, an undesirable group, although, as time passed, the situation became such that contractors were less and less needed and more and more undesirable in a sense, something had to happen to change that situation.

AI: So, in essence, in the earlier years of the contracting system, especially from the point of view of Issei coming with very little English language ability and so forth, the contractors might have been seen as actually a service provider, in some respects, to the Issei --

FM: I would say so, yes, yes.

AI: -- community, in those earlier years?

FM: And they offered a function that I think was necessary in these immigrant communities, and therefore, although there was always a danger that they would take advantage of the fact that they had advantages which the laborers or employees did not, nevertheless, by and large, I found that the contractors, at least the ones I knew, were reasonably fair-minded people and that they did not unduly cheat workers as far as I know. I should tell you a little about the system of organization of the canneries because then you can see, in a sense, where the contractors fitted in and how the supervisory arrangement worked, and to tell you about that, I first need to tell you how the fishing industry was organized.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.