In The Matter of Employment

Samuel H. Whyte
President of the PCWIEA,
a Silver Employee Labor Organization

Edited by Lydia M. Reid

While the Silver workers and their families were entering the urban areas of the major cities in ever greater numbers and settling down as they adapted to their new found neighborhoods in the areas of Calidonia, Marañon, and the City of Colon and its Silver communities, there was a great deal happening within the ranks of the Westindian Silver employees. Their right to employment was being shaken to its very core- had been for decades- and several brave and perceptive leaders in the Silver community were not willing to remain silent while their human rights as citizens were being violated.

We’ve reprinted the following article published in the Panama Tribune on March 2 1947 to begin to give you a panoramic view of the labor struggles encountered by the Silver workers. Please bear in mind that some of these issues continue to affect many groups today in the U.S. as well as in countries like Panama who have been on the receiving end of multitudes of imported labor. These issues have transcended place and time.

Skilled Workers and Technicians Too: The Barrier of Color and Nationality

In the matter of employment on the Canal Zone the West Indian workers and their offspring fit into the old pattern of “the last to be hired and the first to be fired.

Despite their many years residence on the Isthmus and their connections with the Panama Canal they are still regarded as “aliens” by the Canal Administration. However, leaders among the silver employees have consistently contended that those who came and helped build the Canal and the families they have reared- in territory over which the United States exercises jurisdiction- cannot be rightly designated as aliens; that, in the absence of provision for naturalization, they should be considered citizens, in fact.

This contention has been supported, in substance, by the Education Survey Committee from Columbia University which surveyed the Canal Zone educational system in 1930, as well as the Sub-Committee of Military Affairs which, in 1936, investigated the employment status of the West Indian silver employees on the Canal Zone.

Nevertheless the Canal Government has continued to consider these employees as aliens and to enforce certain prejudicial discriminations against them. The field of opportunity of this group of employees is uncharitably and inhumanly prescribed and narrowed within the walls of discrimination based first on citizenship, second on color.

During the late years of the construction period organized labor representing the gold employees started agitation against the employment of “aliens” on the Panama Canal. This observation is predicated upon the knowledge that on March 19, 1915, Colonel Goethals, Governor of the Panama Canal, replying to complaints from gold employee unions, made the following comment:

“Within the recent past I have discharged many colored yard engineers, most of whom have been employed by the Panama Railroad Company since French time, to make place for American Citizens.”

Punctuated by periodic lulls, American organized labor on the Canal Zone, spearheaded by the Panama Metal Trade Council, has maintained its negotiation against the West Indian Worker. At the outset the primary motive was ostensibly based on nationalism, although the consensus of opinion is that it was racial, an opinion indulged by Governor Goethals who branded their complaints against the West Indians as “absurd and untrue,” absolutely false,” “intended to create sympathy for themselves.”

Governor Jay J. Morrow corroborated the sentiment that the agitation was due to racial prejudice.

At the beginning of the world economic depression in 1929 which brought about large scale unemployment in the United States, strong efforts were put forth by the Metal Trade Council through a sentimental appeal to legislators in the United States to divert a goodly number of the army of the unemployed to the Canal area, which in reality, could only accommodate a limited number of positions and would not, in any appreciable degree, relieve the condition in continental United States.

Various Canal Administrations denied support to the campaign of discrimination against the hapless West Indian worker. Having failed in other attempts the MTC invented as an expedient to gain its objectives the fact that the “West Indians constituted a potential menace to the military defense of the canal.”

Three types of bills were thus introduced in the U.S. Congress on this issue: one aiming at total elimination of these workers within a given time, another of elimination of those in skilled and semi-skilled positions, and the third at elimination of all from certain specific places “where they may be able to comfort and support an enemy.”

In November, 1936 PCWIEA President Samuel H. Whyte in a brief to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs stated:

“The government’s policy has remained unchanged from early construction days to the present, on the general principle of retaining West Indian in the service: but for the past 10 years the policy has been modified to conform to the desires of the Metal Trade Council, in the employment of American citizens in the place of aliens in certain skilled and semi-skilled positions. Statistics available to the government should show the incidence of employment on the two rolls (gold and silver). It is believed that the government has maintained its policy of retention in the service on two grounds – moral and economic. On the moral ground: It is believed that the government has taken into account its obligation to the West Indian for the great part they played in the Construction of the Canal. This part constituted a record of faith and dependable service. In almost all branches, more especially in the work of sanitation whereby the Isthmus has been converted from a pesthole of disease into a health resort. This service involved sacrifices of various kinds; and in addition to all it was cheap and highly profitable to the Government. This is the kind of service we have continued to render.

On the economic ground: It is believed that the Government has retained us in the interest of the Investor and of the gold employees of the Canal, and that the latter might continue to enjoy their high standards of wages and many perquisites and privileges, not granted to the aliens.”

Eventually they succeeded in having the McCarran Bill passed which provided that only citizens of the United States of America of the Republic of Panama should occupy skilled, technical, clerical, administrative, executive, or supervisory positions on the Canal Zone. Application of the bill was suspended by President Roosevelt during the War Emergency, but the Metal Trade Council is again engaged in its baiting of aliens; this time seeking to introduce an amendment calling for the displacement of employees other than citizens of the United States in positions above the levels of menials. This has been interpreted as meaning the native Panamanians and led to an exchange of notes between the Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department.

At the twilight of his service career with the Canal Administration the West Indian finds that organized labor among the White North Americans continues, with characteristic egotism, greed, bigotry and intolerance, to plot against his ordinary decency his ultimate consignment to misery and degradation: What can be the reaction among those underprivileged and underpaid employees?

This story continues.