Seattle's Labor Council Moves to Shut the Coast to Filipino Workers
In January 1929 the Seattle Central Labor Council opened a drive to bar Filipinos from the mills, fields and steamships — and a Filipino correspondent made sure the insult was answered in the next morning's paper.
Assertions that Filipinos are swarming into the northwest and crowding white labor from the agricultural fields, lumber industry and maritime trade were being investigated Thursday by the legislative committee of the Seattle Central Labor Council.
The Filipino labor question came before the labor council Wednesday night formally in a letter from N. J. Henry, former member, and in a talk by C. O. Young, veteran organizer in the northwest for the American Federation of Labor.
"The situation is bad in California, and it is rapidly becoming as bad here," Young declared. "In the San Joaquin valley alone there are said to be 70,000 Filipinos. We're getting the same thing in this state. The Yakima valley is being overrun with them. The gates of the Pacific coast are open to them as the law now stands. But they should be excluded."
MAY ASK LAW AS SOLUTION
It was intimated at the meeting of the labor council Wednesday night that legislation barring or limiting the islanders may be sought. Whether Seattle will initiate such a movement was to be determined largely by the findings of the council's legislative committee.
"Second Avenue is getting to look like a street in Manila," said Henry in a letter read to the council members by Leo Lodwich, reading clerk, after it had been introduced by Charles Doyle, council secretary as "containing some facts some of you may not know about."
"In Grays Harbor the Filipinos are supplanting white workmen in the sawmills," Henry declared. "There has been some trouble in Toppenish. The Filipinos are everywhere in the food industry and are crowding into the steamship lines.
"Moreover, the Filipinos are a parasitic menace and naturally not an elevating influence on our young people. Many of them are marrying white girls.
"Those dance halls below Yesler way which formerly were places of entertainment principally for loggers and seafaring men, now are infested" — here Henry used a racial epithet for the Filipians he said had replaced the old clientele.
"Labor can not stand by idly and watch these intruders take their place in our industries. They soon may be a political and economic menace."
Valentin Panganiban, Filipino, answered the above insult the next day through the columns of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“"The gates of the Pacific coast are open to them as the law now stands. But they should be excluded."”
The campaign Seattle's labor council opened in January 1929 fed directly into the exclusion laws and the anti-Filipino violence that swept the coast in the early 1930s. The formula — newest workers are 'crowding' us out, 'they should be excluded' — is one that gets reused about whatever labour migration is newest. What survives alongside it is the last line: a Filipino correspondent making sure the insult did not go unanswered in the next morning's paper.
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