[Murdered by gangsters on a dictator’s orders in 1981, these
pathbreaking Filipino labor organizers fought for union democracy.]
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THE RADICAL VISION OF SILME DOMINGO AND GENE VIERNES  
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Kim Kelly
January 10, 2022
The Nation
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_ Murdered by gangsters on a dictator’s orders in 1981, these
pathbreaking Filipino labor organizers fought for union democracy. _

An unidentified cannery worker lowers a load of freshly canned salmon
into a cooling bath, at a cannery at Alakanuk, Alaska, on August 14,
1962. , JR / AP Photo

 

The cost of labor rights in the United States has always been paid in
workers’ blood. Many of the labor movement’s most critical moments
are scented with gunpowder and dynamite and punctuated by funerals.
Many of the movement’s greatest heroes have been beaten or
imprisoned, and cops and assassins have murdered rank-and-file leaders
like IWW organizer Frank Little, strike balladeer Ella May Wiggins,
Laborers head Joseph Caleb, United Farmworkers strike leader Nagi
Daifullah, and United Mineworkers reformer Jock Yablonski. But even
against that backdrop, the story of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes
sounds more like a 1980s action movie than the real, horrific tragedy
that it was. In 1981, a foreign despot organized the gangland
execution of two young Filipino union organizers, with guns furnished
by their own union president.

Domingo and Viernes are especially relevant now, as thousands of
rank-and-file union members across the country are challenging the
entrenched power structures and sclerotic union leadership whose
actions—or lack thereof—have been disempowering members and
weakening the broader labor movement for decades. In December 2021,
over 60 percent of the membership of the United Auto Workers (UAW),
one of the nation’s most storied unions, voted to implement a system
of direct elections, thus upending the decades-long top-down rule of
the UAW’s Administration Caucus. The referendum was the result of a
consent decree between the union and the US Department of Justice, and
followed a federal corruption probe and years of corruption charges
against various high-ranking UAW officials, including former UAW
presidents
[[link removed]] Gary
Jones and Dennis Williams. Led by the Unite All Workers for Democracy
reform committee, the “one member, one vote” campaign captured the
attention of both the members (143,000 of whom voted) and the labor
movement as a whole.

These are all fights over union democracy—a condition in which
members have a direct say
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representation and the running of their union. Last year, the
Teamsters for a Democratic Union notched a major victory when
members voted overwhelmingly
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progressive, militant Teamsters United slate, toppling the Hoffa
dynasty. The TDU was founded in the 1970s (initially as Teamsters for
a Decent Contract) to push for free and fair elections. After a
sprawling federal racketeering case against the union led to a 1989
consent decree forcing the union to implement “direct rank-and-file
voting by secret ballot in union-wide, one-member, one-vote
elections,” TDU was able to start cleaning up the union, and even
briefly seized power before Jimmy Hoffa’s old guard came crashing
back in in 1998. Now, the reformers have another chance to restore the
union to its fighting form, and trade concessions and sweetheart
contracts for beefed-up representation. TDU promises to modernize
operations, bring Amazon to heel, and build enough power to face down
UPS at the bargaining table in 2023.

Domingo and Viernes would surely have been thrilled to hear about
these developments. They too were elected to leadership on a reform
platform, and were determined to root out the corruption within their
union, Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
(ILWU), which until 1950 had been ​​a local of the United Cannery,
Agricultural, Packinghouse, and Allied Workers of America, and before
that, the ​​Cannery and Farm Labor Union (CFLU) Local 18257. (In a
stroke of foreshadowing, two Filipino CFLU leaders, Aurelio Simon and
Virgil Duyungan—himself accused of corruption—were murdered in
1936 after fighting to abolish the exploitative contract labor system
that kept Asian immigrant cannery workers in a cycle of debt and
poverty. However controversial they may have been in life, their
deaths galvanized the Filipino cannery worker community and
strengthened the union.)

When Domingo and Viernes ventured into the Alaskan canneries in the
1970s, they were building upon decades of organizing, educating, and
agitating by Filipino and Native Alaskan labor organizers and
rank-and-file workers. The two friends—one an unassuming Texan, the
other fond of driving a flashy Monte Carlo, both dedicated
revolutionaries—spearheaded efforts to improve working conditions in
the cold, wet factories full of sharp knives and fish guts where
thousands of seasonal Filipino migrant workers (“Alaskeros”) and
Native Alaskans labored. They were no strangers to the slime line;
Viernes grew up spending his summers working in the Alaskan canneries,
and Domingo had Alaskero experience as well; his father, Nemesio
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a former migrant worker, was also the vice president of Local 37. As
Viernes wrote in his unfinished history of the Alaskeros, “When the
spring field work comes to a grinding halt, many Filipino workers
migrate north to find the one job available to them: sliming fish in
the chilly fish houses of Alaska.… they have tried but cannot find
work elsewhere, lack necessary skills, schooling, or resources, and
are prevented from gaining jobs.”

White employers treated Filipino workers and Native Alaskans
abominably. The Filipino workers were kept in segregated, dank
bunkhouses and served fish-head soup to power their 12-hour shifts.
These migrant workers were part of a seasonal loop that took them from
California’s fields to Washington’s fruit orchards to Alaskan
canneries, and back again. One of the few upsides of this arrangement
was that these workers also carried their shared grievances and union
sympathies with them. When union organizers showed up, they were often
welcomed with open arms by workers fed up with the racism,
discrimination, and brutal working conditions. In 1971, Domingo and
Viernes both found themselves blacklisted from their cannery jobs for
speaking up about racism and soon became involved in the Alaskan
Cannery Workers Association, which brought three class-action lawsuits
against the cannery companies for racial discrimination. That would
mark the beginning of their brief but historic partnership, and showed
how their experience as rank-and-file workers drove them to try to fix
the union they still believed in.

Inspired by Local 37’s militancy in the 1930s and ’40s (when the
contract labor system was finally thrown off for good) and dispirited
by its post–Red Scare conservatism, the two young men resolved to
reform the organization from the inside. They founded a rank-and-file
committee in 1977 devoted to fighting for union democracy and against
corruption, which was already widespread. The union’s dispatch
system, which determined which workers would be sent out to work
assignments and was supposed to operate around seniority, was instead
controlled by dispatchers and foremen who gave the best gigs to their
gambling buddies and those who could afford a bribe. The union’s
cozy relationship with organized crime further complicated matters;
often those jumping the line were Tulisan gang members, who paid their
way into the canneries where they oversaw gambling operations. Trying
to clean up the union was dangerous, but the Rank-and-File Caucus
persevered, quietly organizing across racial lines, training shop
stewards, and building power for several years until they swept the
1980 elections and installed Domingo as secretary-treasurer and
Viernes as a dispatcher.

The pair were also deeply involved in the Filipino community in their
adopted hometown of Seattle, and were local leaders in the
anti-imperialist struggle against the US colonial control of the
Philippines and the country’s kleptocratic dictator, Ferdinand
Marcos and his wife, Imelda. Domingo and Viernes cofounded in the
Seattle chapter of the Union of Democratic Filipinos 
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Demokratikong Pilipino, or KDP), a revolutionary anti-imperialist
socialist organization devoted to combating Marco’s antidemocratic
repression. They worked to foster solidarity across the Filipino
diaspora and to inspire their local community to speak out against the
atrocities happening back in the Philippines. In 1981, Viernes took a
trip to the Philippines to visit family, meet with anti-Marcos union
leaders (and present them with a $290,000 donation
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struggles workers faced under the Marcos regime. His findings were far
from positive, and several months later, at an ILWU convention in
Honolulu, he and Domingo introduced a resolution to investigate the
conditions of workers in the Philippines (to the dismay of the Marcos
supporters within their ranks, which included Local 37 president Tony
Baruso).

Their resolution passed, but those close to them say that the
convention was the moment when Domingo and Viernes knew that their
futures were in jeopardy. Terri Mast
[[link removed]], a Rank-and-File
Caucus member, KDP comrade, and Domingo’s partner, with whom he was
raising two young daughters, characterized their resolution as “a
direct threat” to the Marcos regime, which had little support from
labor due to its inhumane treatment of workers. “The support for the
KMU, the largest trade union federation in the Philippines, had just
been sealed,” she told Ron Chew in his essential oral
history, _Remembering Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes The Legacy of
Filipino American Labor Activism_
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“Any disruptions of cargo in or out of the Philippines would have a
major economic impact on the country.” Between the resolution, and
Viernes’s overseas trip and material support for the anti-Marcos
labor movement, the men were not surprised when they began seeing
unfamiliar cars tailing them and their family members. After the
convention, Domingo came to the Local 37 board with a macabre request:
He wanted to buy life insurance.

Tony Baruso listens to his defense attorney, Tony Savage, in court in
Seattle. Baruso died in prison while serving a life sentence for the
murder of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes. (Grant M. Haller / Seattle
Post-Intelligencer / Associated Press)

His instincts were correct. On June 1, 1981, two Tulisan members
murdered Domingo and Viernes, who were both only 29 years old. Viernes
died immediately, but Domingo, shot four times in the stomach, dragged
himself outside and gasped out the names of the men who’d shot them.
He died the next day, and the men he’d named—“Guloy and
Ramil,” or Pompeyo Benito Guloy and Jimmy Bulosan Ramil, Local 37
members and Tulisan enforcers—were arrested for murder and sentenced
to life in prison, as was gang leader Tony Dictado, who’d put out
the hit and driven the getaway car. The police questioned Baruso, but
he would not face charges until a decade later. According to Seattle
attorney Michael Withey
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Domingo and Viernes who had been the lawyer for ILWU Local 37 in 1981
and wrote a book about the murders, “The FBI was instrumental in the
cover-up and didn’t want Baruso charged by the prosecuting
attorney.” In 1991, Baruso—whom Withey contends the Marcos regime
paid $15,000 [[link removed]] to
orchestrate the murders—was finally found guilty of first-degree
murder and ordered to pay millions
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the victims’ families. He died in prison in 2008.

As the Domingo and Viernes’s families and community mourned, it soon
became clear that the shooters had been bit players in a larger
conspiracy. “I would say it took us less than 48 hours to really map
out who benefitted from the murders, and it was always the Marcos
dictatorship who benefitted from Silme and Gene’s murders,” Cindy
Domingo, Silme’s younger sister, told
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KNKX in 2020. The loss of Domingo and Viernes was devastating, but
their surviving family members and labor comrades continued the work
they’d begun together. Mast and Cindy Domingo worked alongside
dozens of activists to create the Committee for Justice for Domingo
and Viernes, whose legal work would connect the murders directly to
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The Marcos were found guilty by a federal
jury in 1989
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It was the first and only time
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foreign head of state has been held responsible for the deaths of
Americans on US soil.

It’s hard to believe that a story this full of drama, violence,
justice, and heartbreak isn’t common knowledge (or an HBO series),
but Domingo and Viernes, like so many other pivotal labor leaders,
have never gotten as much recognition as they deserve. Their memories
loom large within several spheres, though—in Seattle’s Filipino
and labor communities, in the ILWU’s storied history, and in the
history of trailblazing rank-and-file Asian immigrant worker leaders
in the US labor movement. Using court-ordered funds awarded from both
the Marcos family and the four convicted murderers, Seattle’s
Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office created the Domingo/Viernes
Justice Fund in their memory. The Harry Bridges Labor Center at the
University of Washington offers an annual Silme Domingo & Gene
Viernes Scholarship in Labor Studies 
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committed to the principles of justice and equality and have
demonstrated financial need.” Though devastated by the loss,
Rank-and-File Caucus continued its reform mission, entering a troubled
period before finding new footing in a merger with the Inlandboatmans
Union. Mast, the lifelong labor activist and Domingo’s common-law
widow, stepped in to fill his position in Local 37 after his death,
and has served as the IBU’s secretary-treasurer since 1993.

Silme’s daughter, Ligaya Domingo, was only 3 years old when her
father was murdered, but has kept his memory alive in her own way. She
began her career in labor as a union organizer, and she now works as
the racial justice and education director at SEIU Healthcare 1199NW.
“I was just really instilled with the idea of needing to do work
that changed the world,” she told Ron Chew in his oral history.
“Working in the labor movement in a lot of ways is like home to me,
because I’m with people who understand me on this whole new level
because they know my history.”

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ __permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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_Kim Kelly is a writer and labor activist based in Philadelphia. She
is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American
Labor
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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