Filipino Labor Militancy

From the 1920s to the 1970s, Filipinos were militant farm labor union members and organizers. Filipino workers in the United States and Hawaii began striking for better wages and working conditions as early as 1919, when Pablo Manlapit launched the first Filipino sugar workers strike in Hawaii. Filipinos organized their own all Filipino unions, joined with Mexicans or other Asian Americans, or joined left-leaning unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) or American Federaltion of Labor (AF of L). In Alaska and up and down the west coast, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Filipinos withheld work, went on strike at critical times during the harvest, and formed the backbone of organized labor in the agricultural fields. This long legacy of militancy can be seen in the 1965 Delano grape strike, led by Larry Dulay Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which formed, along with the National Farm Workers Assocation (NFWA), the United Farm Workers Union (UFW).