Hapai ko means literally to carry sugar cane. On sugar plantations in Hawaii, it referred to those workers who carried bundles of cane from the fields where it was cut into ox carts and later railway cars by which it
Hapai ko means literally to carry sugar cane. On sugar plantations in Hawaii, it referred to those workers who carried bundles of cane from the fields where it was cut into ox carts and later railway cars by which it was transported to the mills for milling. Hapai ko also referred to the job of carrying cane. It was generally agreed that the hapai ko man had the hardest job on the plantation, and despite the fact that it sometimes paid slightly more than other tasks, it was often difficult to hire workers willing to do it.
It was also dangerous work as the workers had to ascend and then descend a narrow plank from the ground to the edge of the railroad car carrying a load of 50 to 75 pounds of not always evenly balanced stalks (It should be noted that one of the jobs available to women was to gather the cut stalks and pile them up for the hapai ko man to lift).
On Kauai, to encourage workers in this most arduous task, plantations held contests and rewarded the hardest workers with both recognition and cash prizes for their prowess as hapai ko men. In 1919, two-man teams from seven plantations competed to see who could load the most cane in a 30-minute period. The McBryde team won, loading over 10,000 pounds in half an hour.
More than a decade later, in 1932, in a much more arduous contest, “a little brown faced Filipino by the name of Platon Fermin,” loaded 73,470 pounds (36.73 tons) of cane in one day — presumably 10 hours, as that was the standard for the time — carrying an average load of 60 pounds and walking about 75 feet on each trip. The Garden Island (May 3, 1932) newspaper estimated that he covered about 17.38 miles during the day and credited his partner, Mrs. S. Kato, who arranged 1,224 neat piles of cane for him to carry.
By the late 1930s, hapai ko work was a thing of the past as human cane cutters and loaders were replaced by tractors with rakes which ripped the cane from the fields and cranes with grabbers that loaded more than a ton of cane with each grab. Despite mechanization, not all plantation tasks were replaced by machines. Platon Fermin retired as a seed cutter for McBryde Plantation and died at 100 in 2012.
