Filipino Americans Leading Labor in Alaska

This eleventh day of Filipino American History Month brings another often uncelebrated part of Filipino American history—Alaskeros. Alaskeros are Filipino recruits to Alaska.

Filipino Alaskeros found work in salmon canneries, “kanarya,” in Alaska during the summer and worked along the west coast during other seasons. Alaska was a place to make “quick money,” never “easy money.” Cannery work lasted about two months and as many as 9,000 Filipino men worked at one time during peak salmon canning seasons. Many of them worked to support their families, as well as earn money to pay for higher education.

The salmon canneries, like the California grape growers, were resistant to making changes for their migrant workforce. Since its earliest days in the late 1800s, the salmon industry has depended on an abundant supply of cheap labor that could be deployed at a moment’s notice, or discharged if the salmon run was weak. The workers had to be willing to do grueling work under harsh conditions; they had to be dependable but expendable. Asian immigrants, a captive workforce with a tenuous status in America, were considered ideal and preferable to Native Alaskans, who could easily leave the canneries for home if conditions became intolerable.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 each essentially stopped immigration of Chinese and Japanese people to the United States of America. Filipinos from the Philippines became the largest available source of labor.

In the late 1930s, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrant and Asian American cannery workers attempted to develop a unit front, but the union broke down with changes in the salmon industry and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In its place, ethnic-specific unions competed. Because Filipinos were the main source of the cannery labor pool, their labor organizations, run by Filipino officers, emerged as the most powerful.

Two Filipino American labor leaders were Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, who took a stand against corruption within their own union. This infuriated the Filipino gangsters who ran the gambling rings in the Alaskan cannery towns–which depended on getting their gang members sent to Alaska. Viernes and Domingo had also introduced a resolution at the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) convention to oppose the martial law restrictions against workers and labor unions in the Philippines–a resolution that Marcos supporters called communist. The union leaders became subjects of death threats and surveillance. On the evening of June 1, 1981, two Filipino men with long police rap sheets entered the Local 37 ILWU office and opened fire on their targets, Silme Domingo, twenty-eight years old, and Gene Viernes, twenty-seven. The sacrifices of the Filipino American cannery workers galvanized Asian Americans. They offered another Asian American contribution to civil rights and American democracy. Asian Americans found betrayal, but also discovered a new level of political involvement.