A pernicious rumor is floating around like a bad odor. Word is that despite high unemployment and high demand from customers, employers are facing a labor shortage.

The April jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor released last week disappointed many. Unemployment hovers at around 6 percent. It’s even higher for African-Americans at 9.7 percent and Hispanics at 7.9 percent. Hawaii’s numbers for April aren’t out yet, but the unemployment rate in March was at 9 percent.

Obviously, with unfilled jobs and customers demanding services businesses are worried. What’s the deal? Enter the noxious rumor. Employers blame workers who prefer unemployment checks and the eviction moratorium–programs designed to prevent people from slipping below the poverty line.

Signs at a McDonald’s in New Mexico or Sonic in Texas urge customers to be patient because “no one wants to work.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week urged lawmakers to cut benefits for the unemployed to force them back to work. Senator Lindsey Graham announced that extending unemployment benefits would only happen “over our dead bodies.”

Governors in the south and the west are opting out of federal unemployment benefits to meet the demands of employers and businesses. In South Carolina, the governor claimed that the extra $300 per month from the federal government has “turned into a dangerous federal entitlement, incentivizing and paying workers to stay at home rather than encouraging them to return to the workplace.”

But how does it look to the ones receiving unemployment checks and refusing to go back to work?

Nearly half of the population in the United States isn’t vaccinated and the spread of COVID-19 still runs rampant, ironically in the places where governors want to force people back to work.

So how much are employers paying workers to risk it? Not much apparently. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15. If not for a living wage, why go back?

Perhaps we are witnessing something akin to an unorganized strike; just the thing that happened here long ago.

In 1909 when sugar was king, Japanese cane workers were frustrated. Planters fixed wages based not on experience or skill, but by ethnicity. Japanese workers made less than Portuguese or Puerto Ricans, but more than Filipinos.

They started to organize and demanded more for their labor. On the night of May 9, 1909, workers in Aiea started drumming empty kerosine tin cans in solidarity. At five o’clock the next morning, they went on strike. It spread like cane fire. Three days later, Waipahu workers refused to work. Waialua followed. Then Kahuku, Waianae, and Ewa shut down. By June, 7,000 Japanese workers walked off the job.

Japanese-language newspaper editors championed the cause. A pamphlet circulating around Honolulu put it simply and eloquently:

“The wage is a reward for services done, and a just wage is that which compensates labor to the full value of the service rendered by him. It is an unjust wage to pay the laborer less than the real value of the work performed by him. . . . It is not the color of his skin or hair, or the language he speaks, or manners and customs that grow cane in the field. It is labor that grows cane.”

Wages, they argued, should be based on the cost of living–in other words, a living wage. Employers were aghast. This was unprecedented for Hawaii. They refused to negotiate and evicted the workers. Thousands of laborers and their families were homeless and flooded Honolulu.

The Japanese community responded quickly. A communal kitchen was rigged up in Aala Park near Chinatown. Workers from neighbor islands sent money, rice, and vegetables. Japanese doctors provided free medical services. Local merchants donated to the strike fund.

The planters were undaunted. With the help of the police and prosecutors, pro-worker journalists were arrested for conspiring to boycott plantation businesses and held in solitary confinement for months.

The employers brought in workers from China, the Philippines, Korea, and even Russia to break the strike. After four months of holding out, the exhausted workers returned to the plantations. Mainstream media crowed it was a complete failure.

They were wrong. The 1909 strike was a turning point. The plantations quietly did away with the race-based payment system and raised wages. Labor leaders also learned to look beyond race. The next strike, they realized, must include other nationalities. The seeds of working-class consciousness were sown. It was the start of the modern labor movement in Hawaii.

One hundred and twelve years later as employers grumble about lazy workers who have the audacity to refuse to work for something less than a living wage, remember 1909. Signs at McDonald’s should read “no one wants to work (for these wages and the risk of contracting COVID-19).”

* Ben Lowenthal is a trial and appellate lawyer, currently with the Office of the Public Defender, who grew up on Maui. His email is 808stateofaloha@gmail.com. “The State of Aloha” alternates Fridays with Sarah Ruppenthal’s “Neighbors.”