AANHPI Heritage Month

Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: May is AANHPI Heritage Month so I wanted to continue to highlight some important labor leaders from those groups. This is a continuation of a writeup I did last year on leaders like Ai-Jen Poo, Larry Itliong, Wong Chin Foo, and Philip Vera Cruz - if you want to read more about them, you can check out that writeup on our blog.  

Last year I briefly mentioned Chinese-American’s contributions to the completion of America’s first transcontinental railroad. I briefly summarized their contributions but there’s a lot to their story - if you want to know more, this article goes into a bit more detail about what they endured and their accomplishments on that project. 

Ah Quon McElrath (1915-2008): Ah Quon was born in Hawaii and spent much of her youth helping her family make ends meet by collecting trash, making charcoal to sell to the community, and working in pineapple canneries. Ah Quon finished degrees in sociology and anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1938 and joined the Hawaii Territorial Board of Public Welfare - there, she helped organize the workers and win raises. She also used some social work training to help workers organize during the 1938 Inland Boatmen’s Strike and families recover from the 1946 tsunami which caused major damage to the town of Hilo. Around this time she married Bob McElrath, a fellow organizer who later became the communications director of the Local International Longshore and Warehouse Union chapter (ILWU Local 150). Ah Quon helped provide food and resources to support 26,000 workers when they struck in the 1946 sugar strike, and later served as a legal aide when 7 labor leaders were sued by the federal government for violating the Smith Act (a case the labor leaders eventually won). Ah Quon continued providing social support for the ILWU for years, helping workers navigate their health and medical benefits. She was actively involved in the ILWU through 1981 and continued to speak at union events up until the early 2000’s, when she was entering her nineties.

Gene Viernes (1952 – 1981) & Silme Domingo (1952-1981): Gene and Silme were two Filipino-American activists who were involved in organizing canneries in the northwestern United States in the 1970s. Silme got started in activism in the 1970s and helped organize protests against then-Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986. He also co-founded the Alaska Cannery Workers Association (ACWA), which pursued legal action against discrimination in northwestern canneries. After he posed as a student doing a research project to get inside Washington canneries and gather details on discrimination, the ACWA filed a class-action lawsuit against multiple fish companies and won millions in damages for 700 plaintiffs in 1973. 

Silme later became an officer for Seattle’s Local 37 Cannery Union, running with his friend Gene on a platform of anti-corruption and internal reform. Unfortunately both men were tragically gunned down inside the headquarters of the Local 37 on June 1st, 1981. While some initially suspected that they had been killed due to their reform work, it was later revealed that there were significant links between the killers and the Marcos administration - a federal jury in 1989 agreed that the Marcos administration was likely responsible and they had been killed for their anti-Marcos organizing efforts. 

Prem Pariyar (1984 – Present): Prem is an Nepali-American organizer who has fought to eradicate caste-based discrimination in the United States. Prem was born in Nepal in the Dalit community, a group of people who are considered socially inferior to everyone else. While the caste system was theoretically abolished in Nepal in 1964 (and while this was later codified in the 2014 constitution), approximately 400,000 Dalits still experience social exclusion and even assault if they attempt to engage in the same social activities or spaces as members of higher castes. Prem advocated for the Dalits while in Nepal. He immigrated to America in the early 2000’s and found that many of the same caste dynamics were replicated among Nepalese and Indian immigrants, leading to social exclusion and hiring discrimination. He worked to organize salon workers experiencing discrimination and after starting a masters degree in social work he pushed for changes in higher education. He worked with an existing non-profit, the Equality Lab, to push universities around the US to establish bans on caste-discrimination, and then pushed cities like Seattle and Fresno to update their anti-discrimination ordinances to ban caste-discrimination as well. He is currently working to push changes at the state level as well - California’s Congress passed a caste discrimination ban in 2023, but this was vetoed by their governor before going into effect.  

Saket Soni: Saket is an Indian-American labor organizer who started his career doing community organizing in Illinois. He later became the founder and director of a group called Resilience Force which organizes workers in the emerging climate disaster recovery field - around the same time he also founded the National Guestworker Alliance, to protect the rights of non-citizen workers brought in to work in America for specific projects. After Hurricane Katrina flooded Louisiana in the early 2000’s and caused billions in property damage, thousands of migrant workers were brought in to help clean up and repair the state. Saket discovered that hundreds of Indian workers had been brought in on exploitative contracts and were being held in a work camp (built above a former toxic waste dump) in indentured servitude-like conditions - they were only allowed to leave the camp under armed guard, were fed moldy food for their meals, were forced to turn over most of their paychecks to the company, and were forced to live 24 men to a single trailer. Saket helped organize an escape for these men and supported them as they pursued legal action against their employer - they eventually won millions of dollars in a 2015 settlement where the company, Signal International, was found guilty of labor trafficking, fraud, racketeering and discrimination.