Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Labor Conditions in Hawaii: Letter From the Secretary of Labor Transmitting the Fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics on Labor Conditions in the Territory of Hawaii for the Year 1915
Skilled American and part-hawaiian mechanics in Honolulu earn from $3 to $5 a day, and unskilled laborers and helpers are paid and $2 a day. Working people of this class live in small frame cottages, not so good as the houses occupied by town and village workers Of the same grade in our colder American climate, but preferable as homes to many of the tenements occupied by the un skilled laboring population Of our large cities. Clothing costs more per article but less per individual than on the mainland. Little fuel is used except for cooking, and table expenses vary with the manner as well as the standard of living - this depending upon the propor tion of imported food the taste Of the workingman demands. The general condition of Hawaiian workers presents no evidence Of economic hardship, though individual instances of such hardship doubtless occur.
Beneath the surface also there must lurk traces Of the struggle attending the displacement Of white and Hawaiian by oriental labor, which has continued ever since Asiatics began to leave field work for other occupations. However, this displacement has been caused by social antipathies almost as much as by economic competition, and data relating to its various phases are largely conjectural.
Rural labor conditions are standardized by the nearly uniform practice of sugar plantations, and here we enter the realm Of more exact information. Sugar plantations employ so large a part Of the rural laboring population that other employers are obliged to con form to their labor standards. Moreover these plantations keep a statistical record of their labor history.
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