In 1981 two young cannery worker union organizers,
Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, were gunned down in Seattle by hitmen hired by
a corrupt union president in league with Philippines President Ferdinand
Marcos. Viernes and Domingo were part of a uniquely American story involving racism,
violence, jobs, and a fight for what’s right. Centered on the salmon canning
industry, it is part of Alaska’s story too, and with its origins in Uganik Bay,
an intrinsic part of the history of Kodiak Island.
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Gene Viernes, early 1970s. Photo: Ron Chew,
"Remembering Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes,"
WSU Press, 2012
|
Gene Viernes was originally from eastern Washington,
and went to work at the Red Salmon Cannery in Naknek in 1969. Silme Domingo was
from Seattle and also in 1969, began working at the New England Fish Company’s
cannery in Uganik Bay, where his father, one of the old cannery “manongs,” had
worked thirty years before. Like many other young Filipinos in those years,
both men found the century old system of separate bunkhouses, mess halls and
jobs for Filipinos and Alaska Natives a degrading anachronism in a society that
had outlawed “separate but equal,” facilities for African Americans twenty
years
 |
Silme Domingo
Photo: Ron Chew, "Remembering
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes,"
WSU Press, 2012
|
Their experiences led eventually to reform of the cannery
worker union hiring system, and an end to racial segregation of jobs and living
facilities in Alaska’s canneries. The fight to end union corruption cost them
their lives. The larger struggle to desegregate the canneries ended up in the
U.S. Supreme Court.
The Alaskan canned salmon industry began in the 1870s
in Southeast Alaska and was immediately lucrative for everyone involved. Like
all extraction industries, it required three things: raw material, capital, and
people to do the work. Alaska had the salmon, San Francisco businessmen had the
money to build the canneries, and at least at first, Chinese immigrants did the
work.
The Chinese had come to California in the 1840s to
work in the gold placer mines, but as the gold played out, began working in
salmon canneries on the Sacramento River, and then the Columbia, and eventually
Alaska, including at Karluk, Uyak, and Uganik, on Kodiak Island. In 1882
however, driven by raw racism and fear of a “yellow horde,” of Chinese workers
taking white American jobs, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Act
mostly let the Chinese who were already here remain in the U.S., but it choked
off further immigration.
Fortuitously for the salmon industry however, just as
the resident Chinese began aging out of the work force in the early 20th
century, thousands of young Filipino men, many of them college students, began
arriving on the West Coast looking for work. Happy beneficiaries of the U.S. annexation
of the Philippines following the 1898 Spanish-American War, these men and their
sons and grandsons took the places of the Chinese on the cannery slime lines, eventually
becoming known as the “Alaskeros,” sailing north each summer from San Francisco
and Portland and Seattle to put salmon into cans. The Alaskeros would dominate
the fish processing industry for the next hundred years and their descendants,
having moved north to live, are a large part of the social fabric of Alaska
today.
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San Juan Salmon Packers Packaging Crew, Uganik Bay Cannery,
Kodiak Island, 1940s. University of Washington Archives.
|
In 1970, when Silme Domingo, his brother Nemesio, and
a group of other young Filipinos tried to enter the white mess hall in Uganik
for food not available at the Filipino mess hall, they were told to leave. That
winter, apparently based on their challenge of the segregation system, the
Domingo brothers received letters from New England Fish Company, which owned
the Uganik cannery, informing them they would not be hired for the upcoming
season, or indeed, ever again. In 1972, Viernes, by then working at Wards Cove
Cannery in Ketchikan, and similarly chafing at the old segregation rules, led a
boycott of the Filipino mess hall after being denied entrance to the white mess
hall. He too was blacklisted.
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| Salmon cannery worker, Grimes Cannery, Kodiak Island, Alaska, 1960s KMM Salmon Cannery History Collection |
With these experiences driving them, Viernes, the
Domingo brothers and other cannery workers, including Alaska Natives, formed
the Alaska Cannery Workers Association, (ACWA). In 1973 and 1974 ACWA filed
lawsuits against three Alaskan salmon packers, alleging discrimination under
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The first case, Domingo versus New England Fish
Company (NEFCO) ended in 1980 when NEFCO filed for bankruptcy. The second case,
Carpenter vs NEFCO-Fidalgo Packing Co. was settled out of court in 1985,
providing cash settlements for ten plaintiffs. The third case, Atonio vs
Wards Cove Packing Co., went to the Supreme Court, which, in a series of
decisions, ended the suit and limited the rights of workers to sue their employers
for discrimination.
In response to the Supreme Court’s backpedaling on
labor and civil rights, Congress wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which explicitly
strengthened worker’s rights.
Before it passed however, bowing to pressure from the
salmon industry, Alaska’s Senators Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens inserted a
clause which exempted Alaskan cannery workers from the protections of the new
law. The irony of the cannery workers being exempted from a law explicitly
designed to remedy their experience of racist labor practices was not lost on anyone,
but the votes of the two Alaskan Senators being necessary for passage, and
compromise being the grease of politics, it was voted into law.
Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo did not live to see
any of this. In their efforts to enlist the help of Seattle Local 37 of the International
Longshore Workers Union in the lawsuits, they had challenged the local union
president, Tony Baruso, for control of the union. Baruso ran the union as a
corrupt minor fiefdom, charging bribes for cannery job placement, and sending
gambling shills north to rake off cannery worker’s pay in their off hours. He
was not interested in suing the salmon canneries over segregated mess halls. Baruso
was also an ally of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, no friend of
unions, at least fair practice unions, and whom Viernes and Domingo had angered
while on a labor organizing trip to the Philippines in the spring of 1981.
On June 1, 1981, a few weeks after returning from the
Philippines, Viernes and Domingo were shot in the Local 37 union hall near
Pioneer Square by two gunmen hired by Tony Dictado, a local gang leader who worked
as an enforcer for Tony Baruso. Viernes died at the scene and Domingo died the
next day at Harborview Hospital.
Within days of the murders, the union rank and file
seized control of the union and eliminated the bribes for jobs system. Dictado,
Baruso, and the two shooters were all eventually found guilty of various
degrees of murder. Baruso died in prison in 2008.
After evidence was produced that Philippines
President Marcos had supplied $15,000 to pay the gunmen, the families of Gene
Vierne and Silme Domingo filed a wrongful death civil suit against Marcos’s
estate, and in 1990 a Federal jury awarded $15.1 million in damages. Marcos
himself died in September, 1989. Later reduced to $2 million, the case stands
as the only successful lawsuit against a foreign government for the death of a
U.S. citizen.
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| Seattle Local 37 Union Hall, April 2015 KMM Salmon Cannery History Collection |
For more information on the story
of Filipino cannery workers and their fight for labor rights, see: “Remembering
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes: The Legacy of Filipino Labor Activism,” by Ron
Chew,” University of Washington Press, 2012.
