When David Della was sixteen years old in the late 1970s, he did not spend his summers like most other teenagers. He did not spend time with friends and family, nor did he work a local job as a newspaper courier. He did what his father and his grandfather had done: he traveled from his hometown in Seattle, Washington, to Alaska to work in canneries. There, he carried out labor-intensive tasks, such as cutting, gutting, and washing fish on an assembly line. During peak season, the canneries ran twenty-four hour days, seven days a week, with employees working sixty to eighty hours days. He noted that it was a natural thing for Filipino males to work in the canneries during summers, noting the commonality of such work for the Filipino community.

Della added that he and many around him began to question the working conditions that Filipino cannery workers, or those working in the industry of packing food into cans, faced at the factories. He attributed his growing awareness of labor conditions to the civil rights and anti-war movements, both of which energized him and other cannery workers to organize and fight against the segregation and discrimination they experienced.

In this module, we learn about those Asian American workers who were employed at the salmon canneries in Alaska and how these workers organized. In the face of deportation and even death, they worked together to change their discriminatory working conditions. We also explore the impact of their lawsuits on civil and labor rights.