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HM: But during this time period I got together with Tom Koizumi, who was a third level manager in the Boeing business operations area. And Tom used to say, "Well, we gotta get the Asian engineers together, and we gotta make a kind of a platform for us to convey our thoughts to the management." And I agreed with him. And we eventually formed this Asian Technical Employees Association, and we tried to band all the Nikkei together. And it ended up with a session with the head of Industrial Relations at Boeing, and he more or less told us if we don't stop the activity, he was going to have us terminated. Well, that's against all the federal labor laws. And in the course of about three weeks he had to reassemble us together in his office and he served us coffee in his silverware set, and he apologized because he knew that we could have taken action on him. That was in violation of federal labor laws. You can't threaten people to get terminated. So, this is the other avenue that we were taking. Tom was very into political activities. He was in the forty-seventh precinct. He was a precinct (committeeman). He knew all the political types, the congressional representatives in our local area, knew all the legislative aides for Magnuson and Henry Jackson and all this kind of stuff. So, we figured well, let's try to do something from a political standpoint and see how much support we can get from the political area. And one of the efforts that we instigated was the economic or employment opportunity program, EO programs. So Tom was able to access lot of the Boeing labor and employment summaries. And they used to submit to the federal government these employment surveys that all these large defense contractors that had government contracts had to supply to the government. And in that it showed that although Asians represented eleven percent of the engineering force, there was only about one point, at that time 1.4 percent in management. And they weren't in engineering basically, they were in other areas, like accounting and various other fields. And the distribution of income in terms of salary are relative to number of years in college training. We were getting less money than our equivalent peers in the engineering workforce. So Tom felt that this was a better avenue of approach rather than trying to go after some kind of post-World War II remedial legislation on evacuation.

TI: You mean approach being that making this information, or getting this information out so that Nisei engineers and others would be promoted to managerial positions? Is that the approach?

HM: Well for one thing to increase their salaries because we were, even though we had higher educational levels, just based on age brackets, we had higher educational achievements than the peer group and yet we were making six percent less salary. And these were fairly reliable numbers because we were using at that time somewhere in the neighborhood of about eight thousand engineers in that population.

TI: Okay, but going back to Tom's approach; so he was thinking, what happened sorta happened, let's not really try to fix that, but let's really address today --

HM: And the forward...

TI: And go forward --

HM: Future picture.

TI: And let's raise our pay, let's sort of fix those inequalities now, would be his focus.

HM: Yeah.

TI: Okay.

HM: But the more he got into this kind of activity, because he was getting these reports that were not available to the regular engineering workforce, he was warned by his boss that he better cut out some of this extracurricular stuff, because, "I know you're involved with some of these things," and when he was called in front of the Director of Industrial Relations, the report was given back to his boss, Tom's boss, that he was participating in this kind of function. So as it happened, he went on vacation for a couple of weeks and when he went back to work, his whole office area was gone. His whole staff was, had disappeared.

TI: And what reason was given to him?

HM: Well, they said that they were reorganizing his whole department, business management. [Laughs] And that was the writing on the wall for him. But he still pursued the activities.

TI: What, did the Nikkei engineers band around that and try to do something given that he was trying to organize the group, was this an incident that you got together and talked about or did something about?

HM: Well we made quite a few demands on the Industrial Relations Department. One was the fact that we were underrepresented in management, secondly, our salaries were less than the normal engineering population, and on top of that, we had more responsibilities that weren't honored. And we wanted a vice president, Asian vice president to be appointed or be promoted to that level in the engineering area. These were demands that we placed on the head of the Industrial Relations Department, and they didn't take that too kindly. They felt that we were completely out of line and their, the threat that they would fire these individuals that were active in these areas was one of the things that took place. Well, the fact that when he came back off of vacation and nobody was around anymore, his secretary was gone, his whole staff of people that he used to have -- 'cause he had quite a bit of responsibility at that time -- they all disappeared overnight. And this was the writing on the wall.

TI: Well, yeah. It seems like that's a pretty clear response from the management that here you placed these demands to the management and they essentially -- I mean he stuck his neck out and it essentially got chopped off.

HM: Yeah, yeah. Well in order to cope with that, we were trying to get the reports made available to the Asian Engineers Association. And we filed for some of these data summaries from the Department of Labor. And we went through a whole bunch of rigmarole -- they wouldn't respond to us. They said that we weren't a legitimate organization and all this kind of junk. And finally we go into the congressman and they were able to bend the Department of Labor files a little bit, and they said, "Well, we'll give you that information." The fact that Tom was using the Boeing management information system was not a legal means of getting the report for the Technical Employees Association. So consequently, they said, "Okay, you guys could have the reports of the Boeing Labor summary if you would identify what page numbers these things are in, and justify your request for the reproduction of the things." And we went through the entire process and the Department of Labor put these things all out of focus on the Xerox machine, and they sent us 400 pages of junk. You couldn't read any of it except maybe the title of the top page. And so all this stuff was useless. And these were different approaches that the Department of Labor were taking. So anyway, Tom decided we were going to file a complaint to the EEO office.

TI: About what year was this? What's the time period?

HM: This was about the same time period I was doing my junk at the U of W. And --

TI: So late '60s...

HM: And this was one of the --

TI: ...early '70s.

HM: Yeah.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.