No Time for Comedy

As opening sessions of the Hawaiian legislature go, last week's was positively funereal. Only two hula dancers--instead of the usual two dozen--undulated through the halls of Iolani Palace, threading in & out the aisles around the legislators. There was only one band and one glee club to accompany them. The 30 members of the house and their 15 colleagues in the senate dispensed with the normal rounds of comradely hotfoots and other such capers and grimly got down to business.

The legislators were assembled in special session. Governor Ingram Stainback wanted a law which would end the paralyzing strike of Harry Bridges' Communist-line International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (TIME, July 4). Nobody was in the mood for comedy. Up before the legislature were 19 different proposals for emergency action. One soon passed in the house, but ran into delay in the senate. It would authorize the territory to set up its own stevedoring company, rent docks and equipment from the struck companies and operate them until the strike was settled.

Hawaii's 540,000 residents were getting enough to eat, thanks to relief ships which the strikers agreed to let through (and got paid regular rates for unloading). But the strike already had deepened Hawaii's postwar economic recession; it had cost the islands $22,560,000 in lost wages and business income, according to an employers' estimate. Some 150 firms had cut their employees' wages from 5% to 50%. Raw sugar worth $44 million was piling up in warehouses, tennis courts, gyms, stables and hangars.

The seven struck stevedoring companies, largely controlled by Hawaii's Big Five, had refused adamantly to arbitrate the dispute, or to give ground to the longshoremen's demands for a 32-c--an-hour boost in pay (to $1.72). Said Governor Stainback: "I'm inclined to say a plague on both your houses."

At week's end, Harry Bridges' boys were struck by the kind of small, sharp stab that stings, even if it doesn't gravely wound. Thirty-three members of the A.F.L. Seafarers International Union were sneaked aboard the grey and white freighter Steel Flyer. Non-union stevedores had loaded 6,200 tons of raw sugar aboard it. At 9:10 p.m. one night, to the chagrin of the strikers, it sailed away, bound for the East Coast of the U.S., where Joe Ryan's A.F.L. longshoremen--long sworn enemies of Harry Bridges--would willingly unload it. It was the first tied-up ship to sail since the strike began three months ago.

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