"As a result of increased planting of pineapple at lower costs in other parts of the world, the company believes that it will not be economically feasible to continue to produce pineapples in Hawaii," Del Monte said in a statement. "In fact, today it would be cheaper for Del Monte to buy pineapples on the open market than for the company to grow, market and distribute Hawaiian pineapple."
Pineapples aren't, in fact, all that big a business in Hawaii -- last year's crop was worth about $80 million. But the symbolism of Hawaiian pineapples still has a special resonance. The state's sugar industry has already all but packed up and left, its plantations paved over and turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. (I do have the old commercial jingle for C&H "pure cane sugar" going through my head right now, however.)
"I think that American workers everywhere, literally from Hawaii to Maine to Texas to Michigan, are vulnerable to outsourcing and that's really what this is about," Hanan Kolko, a New York labor lawyer, told The Associated Press.
