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Abstract: In this lecture, we will discuss the formation of the Alaska Cannery Workers Association (ACWA), an organization of Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and Samoan American cannery workers.  When the group formed in 1973, they drew upon a long tradition of Asian migrant labor organizing in Alaska’s salmon canneries, which at least stretched back to the 1930s.  However, as my lecture will stress, they had other political influences.  Namely, the resources and political strategies of the United Construction Workers Association (UCWA), a group of Black workers in Seattle’s construction industry, were critical to their formation.  In turn, we will use the history of the ACWA and their relations to the UCWA to not examine a labor struggle of local significance, but to think about a deeper political question, what does working-class, cross-racial solidarity look like?

Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechtering is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University (WWU). He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  His research uses social movement history and Comparative Ethnic Studies to explore how communities of color in the United States have both questioned and crossed racial boundaries. 

He is the author of “The Alaska Cannery Workers Association and the Ebbs and Flows of Struggle: Manong Knowledge, Blues Epistemology, and Racial Cross-Fertilization,” which was published in the Amerasia Journal.  Moreover, he has forthcoming publications in two edited volumes on Filipino American Studies, Diaspora Dreams: The Filipino Second Generation and Filipinx American Studies: A Critical Registry of Terms.   

Schulze-Oechtering is currently at work on a book manuscript, No Separate Peace: Multiracial Struggles Against Racial Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s.