Introduction.

The long history of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American workers organizing in guilds and labor unions--in California, from the Gold Rush to the building of the transcontinental railroad and onwards--has been obscured in the decades following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This complex law, the United States' first major immigration legislation, was explicitly designed to reduce the number of people of Chinese descent in the U.S., and to disenfranchise as many as possible through measures such as removing the right to naturalization. (1) By the late 1880s, in the wake of this new law, many labor unions began to agitate against workers of Chinese descent and for "white labor only." While workers like shoemaker and Irish immigrant Patrick J. Healy and union leader Sigismund Danielewicz made strong stands against exclusion, the labor leaders who became most powerful, like Knights of Labor president Terrence V. Powderly, expelled Chinese workers from unions. (2)

Many mainstream white business and political leaders showed support for barring Chinese workers from unions. Among them was California's former Exclusion Governor, George C. Perkins, now a powerful U.S. Senator, who warned that organized Chinese laborers posed a threat to business: "If [the Chinese] were firmly entrenched here, there would be introduced a trades-union system compared with which the American system is child's play," he wrote in his 1906 "Reasons for Continued Chinese Exclusion" (North American Review). Government officials also showed their support in other ways; after he expelled the Chinese members of the Knight of Labor, Powderly would later be appointed the U.S. Commissioner-General of Immigration.

As many major labor unions pursued strategies of building solidarity around a focus on white male workers, they dropped from their accounts the long history of organized labor among people of Chinese descent. Already as early as 1901, Ho Yow found it necessary to remind North American Review readers that "[t]he Historian Hittel tells how white and yellow laborers marched in one industrial procession through the streets of San Francisco, as it were proper they should march, and as they would today were it not that the laboring people are being constantly misled and wrongly taught on this Chinese question by mischievous persons." (3) Today, most labor historians are completely unaware of this major part of labor history's existence. This volume is part of correcting that record.

In the historical overview co-authored with Russell Jeung, his own article on the Chinese garment industry guilds of San Francisco, and a careful selection from rare primary source documents, Him Mark Lai brings forward a history of labor organizing and garment work which we learn intertwines with his family's own. His mother, Dong Shee Lai (Dong Hing Mui), in the 1920s became the first female apprentice (studying under her guild-member husband) to the guild that by the late 1880s had become one of San Francisco's major labor organizations, the Gam Yee Hong guild for workers making overalls and workmen's clothing, and Him Mark himself worked in the garment factories to pay his way through school.

The focus on labor in the garment industry is given fuller context with Walter Fong's introduction to the history and operating practices of Chinese labor unions in the U.S. An 1896 publication in a mainstream periodical, the Chautauquan, Fong's history pays particular attention to the then major unions, those of the laundrymen, cigarmakers, shoemakers, jean-clothes tailors, and makers of ladies underwear. Lisa See lends photos and history from her family's story, told in On Gold Mountain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), bringing a personal face of the industry related to the latter guild.

A 1924 article by Shuyao traces the history of the Unionist Guild of America, the Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zhonghui. Organizing themselves in 1919, the Guild presented to factory owners a set of demands to institute a work day limited to nine hours, with overtime pay for overtime worked, and standard benefits like medical insurance, all medical expenses for on the job injuries, and paid time off for official U.S. holidays. When, after negotiations with 33 factories brought signed agreements with 32, the Guild's three-day strike convinced the remaining factory owner not only to sign on, but also to compensate each worker for the wages lost during the strike. With the history of the Guild, we also learn of Alice Sum, one of the earliest women active in Chinese American labor organizing.

A new translation, an archived oral history, and Chinese Digest's on the ground reporting on the union's 1938 strike, share the story of female garment workers organizing with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for better wages and working conditions. Writing in Chung Sai Yat Po, ILGWU organizer Benjamin Fee assesses the decline of the garment industry, noting structural problems, such as weak capitalization and seasonal layoffs, that were hampering successful factory operation even beyond the effects of the Depression. Fee makes a case for the organization of both workers and contractors, and argues an inherent solidarity among "Overseas Chinese," who all, he states, regardless of whether they are workers or factory owners, face life under an imposed "economic repression," and therefore need to reach solutions for long term mutual benefit.