On Tuesday, December 15th, 1970 a special advisory committee representing a cross-section of Hawai’i’s unions first met to develop plans for the opening programs of a new weekly public television series designed for the working people of the islands. It was decided at that meeting that the title of series would be Rice & Roses, from an idea that occurred to David Thompson of the ILWU when he read the famous, old IWW poem “Bread & Roses.” The poet James Oppenheim had taken his title in his words, “a slogan of the women in the West.” Not long afterwards it was connected with the plight of young mill girls in the 1912 Lawrence textile strike in Massachusetts. [see: Bread and Roses: The Lost Histories of a Slogan and a Poem By Jim Zwick, July 20, 2002]

The poem’s unforgettable refrain, “We want bread and roses too.” was later set to music and the poem has since become almost a labor union anthem of the East Coast garment workers. It emphasizes the call of the working men and women for more than just survival wages, more than just bread alone. As the poem asserts “Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!”

The image of “roses” symbolizes all the things that can nourish the mind and soul of the worker. And, though in the poem “bread” symbolizes the basic necessities that nourish and sustain the body, for Hawai`i’s workers it was decided that “rice” instead of “bread” better expressed this metaphor.