<Begin Segment 7>

TI: Now how did the other Nikkei engineers feel about the work that you and Tom were doing? Were they in support? Or was there... what were the others feeling at this point?

HM: They -- we were disappointed in the number of people that would support us because it was a very small minority of people.

TI: 'Cause you're talking about eleven percent of the engineers, which is a really large number. You're talking about --

HM: Yeah. About, close to a thousand people.

TI: Okay, so a thousand Japanese American...

HM: And Chinese Americans.

TI: So Asian American...

HM: Korean Americans --

TI: ...engineers, a thousand.

HM: Yeah.

TI: And of that group, a thousand, how many do you think were supporting what you and Tom were doing?

HM: Well our membership roll went up to about 160, but that's about all we got in the Boeing area. And we used to send out -- well I was doing a lot of funny things like the reproduction of memos that we sent out. We used to send them through the company mail which was really not authorized, but nonetheless, I had access to all the reproduction machines and all this kind of stuff, and we used to print out these notices to help our own efforts. And Tom would -- Tom and I would draft the letters and we'd get it, our secretaries used to type it up for us. And this was the kind of stuff that Boeing human resources people were really ticked off at us for. And at that time I had a Nisei, or I guess she's a Sansei secretary, and she was very interested in this area, so she would type up all the stuff for me, and we'd get it reproduced, and we used to send it through the Boeing mail and it didn't cost us anything.

TI: And you said you had 160 who joined --

HM: Yeah.

TI: And that group of 160, how supportive were they of your efforts to get this information?

HM: Well, when we started talking about taking action against the company, well the number dwindled all of a sudden down to about forty people I guess, something like that. And one of the major groups was Ken Nakano's group. And they were in the electrical wiring group.

TI: When you say major group, major group in joining the group to take action?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Okay.

HM: Yeah, because here you had like Fay Hong, you know the guy that runs Hong's Garden Restaurant, and he had the Hong's Restaurant down in the International District. Well he was a, he had a Masters Degree in electrical engineering and he was in the wiring group. I mean, this was a group that it was -- before it became computerized it was all detail work. You had to do wiring runs between different cables in the airplane and you had to be able to discern what connectors they went through and all this kind of stuff, and how you would distribute the wiring so that you wouldn't have one accident damage all the wiring processes for a given system. And it had to be a multiple type system. Anyway, this was the kind of labor force they had. And the Boeing human resources people felt that the only people that would take this kind of crap would be Asians. And they were; they were mostly Asians in that wiring group. And Ken Nakano happened to be one of them. Anyway, that's where I got to know Ken initially. And we saw the plight of that organization. Here they were over-trained, overeducated and they were given these menial jobs that were less than the company average salaries. And we thought this was a really interesting case that we could bring to bear on the company. And this was -- the data was prepared to meet this area's demand, and then this EEO woman tells us we gotta chop our workforce in half. She came back with a very strong letter, and it was a very demeaning letter, really. And I wanted to get her fired because she was not in compliance with the directives of the EEO. And so I told Tom, "Let's see if we can put some pressure on this woman and get her transferred."

TI: Now why would you go through this woman and not go directly to Boeing management to address these concerns?

HM: Well, we had done that.

TI: That's when Tom sorta lost his group.

HM: Yeah.

TI: So your sense was that if you went, if you kept pursuing that path you wouldn't get any response.

HM: Yeah, all of us would have been laid off or fired for one reason or the other. In my case --

TI: So your strategy was to get the federal government involved.

HM: In my case the meeting with the Human Resources Department was the warning like Tom had in terms of his disintegration of his group in the two-week vacation period. So they were applying pressure to us to eliminate this kind of threat. But I felt that we needed to get rid of this EEO person and have her transferred someplace else. Get her promoted someplace and move her out of the Seattle area, otherwise we'd have no possibility of enforcing this whole negotiation process with the company. So anyway, we were trying to get Henry Jackson to get her promoted so that she'd move out. [Laughs] But I was doing all these other activities, besides working for my salary.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.