<Begin Segment 7>

PF: Your work in arbitration, when did that start taking off? I know you worked in a few firms and doing general law, and then you were appointed, right?

TT: When did that start?

PF: Yeah, and how did that flourish? 'Cause I know you spent most of your career doing the arbitration work. Can you tell me about that?

TT: Yeah, well, my appointment... let me say a few words about that. Like I said, Eddie Nakamura, who was the... he's a fellow VVV veteran, 442 veteran, a neighbor since I knew him from childhood. When he approached me to be an arbitrator, he had apparently persuaded, first, Jack Hall of the union to nominate me to become an arbitrator. But his problem as the attorney, was that he said that the arbitration of cases prior to that were won mostly by the employers. And that was because most of the, most if not all of the arbitrators were haoles. And there were... the few haoles that had a, who were not sort of bound into the establishment, were, and Harold Burr was head of the social security, he was, I guess, brought in from the mainland. So he wasn't a local, he wasn't indoctrinated into being an establishment type. And then William Cobb, who served here in the navy intelligence during the war, and ended up being a, for instance, collector of customs, I believe. Anyway, Burr and Cobb, and I was the third, we were appointed in 1959. And according to Ed Nakamura, that leveled the playing field so that thereafter, the unions were winning their share of the cases. In other words, again, the composition of the decision makers racially apparently had an effect prior to our appointment. So after our appointment, Ed says that the unions felt that they were getting a square shake, and even starting from the 1960s, I began to get more and more appointments. And, you know, I was spending a considerable amount of what should have been spent as a lawyer. I was selected and performing, deciding arbitration disputes. That started in 1959, and it continued for the next five plus decades.

PF: Are there any cases that stand out in your mind over the years as you've arbitrated?

TT: Oh, yeah, yeah. Mostly, you might say, labor management issue oriented decisions like, for instance, we'd have a lot of grievances filed by the teacher's union objecting or contesting the discharge of teachers who were fired because of medical or mental breakdown, not because of performance. And, you know, when a person is discharged, it should be fault-oriented. If you're at fault, then you deserve to be disciplined and even discharged. But where you're like a teacher who has been teaching on the job, and through strain or stress or otherwise, they have mental or psychological breakdowns, those are not fault-oriented, they're other than, they're non-fault. And so I remember in my decisions, introduced the concept that questioned whether discipline and discharge for non-fault reasons should be upheld by arbitrators. Like, for instance, a good case would be a telephone operator at Hawaiian Telephone, it was called Mutual Telephone company in those days. And this old-time telephone operator had been at the job maybe thirty years, and so she was getting older and maybe burning out, she was making more and more mistakes, so they fired her. Although it was performance based, the poor performance was attributable to a medical or some cause that was beyond her fault, beyond her control, beyond her fault. And so I remember -- I forgot exactly what I decided, but I said, I made the analogy of, like the faithful fire horse that pulls the fire engine for many years, and when he's too old to pull the engine, they send him to the glue factory? I said that's not right. They should pasture him up. Same thing here. I think in that case I said the company should try to find some other job that this person can perform and promote her sideways rather than summarily firing her. I did, I remember interjecting some of the extraordinary decisions that you might say changed the perspective of labor arbitration. Joyce Najita can tell you more examples of other areas where I may have innovated some remedial changes.

PF: Did she work with you?

TT: She's an arbitrator herself, but she's the head of the Industrial Relations Center, of the University of Hawaii. So she's an arbitrator herself.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.