IV

A COMMUNITY OF THEIR OWN

My mother got involved in January of 1985. She first came down to help with one of the mailings, then she got more and more involved. And she found out that she was somebody. Money couldn’t buy what it’s done for her—“Gol,” she said, “somebody needs me.”

—Vicky Guyette describing her mother’s involvement in the United Support Group¹

By October Austin residents were bitterly divided over the question of how best to preserve their community: Should one support the strike or should one side with the employer who provided one in four of the town’s paychecks? For some—most union members or members of management families—the answer was a foregone conclusion. For others, it was a question of personal loyalty to friends and ideals. But it was difficult to avoid making a choice: It became no longer possible to be loyal to the Austin community as a whole. Ultimately, divisions surfaced in every social context, including the local schools, churches, and clubs. The stores in which one shopped, the restaurants or bars patronized—every social choice was shaped by the conflict.

Most area businessmen were unmoved by the local’s argument that the pre-strike wage cut had brought serious economic harm—perhaps a $700,000 reduction in the local area’s payroll. There were exceptions, made plain to all by “We Support Local P-9” signs posted in the windows of a few shops, such as Klagge’s Ice Cream and Star Liquors. (A supermarket like the IGA, on the other hand, might be seen as signaling its hostility to P-9 with heavy promotions of Hormel products.) But when called upon to comment, most businesspeople focused upon the harm caused by the strike rather than the company’s cutbacks. An early October Rochester Post-Bulletin article detailed their concerns: The owner of Ferris TV said that her business had dropped by 42 percent; the Cantonese Inn, Country Store Foods grocery, and Stephens In The Mall restaurant had closed for good; on their way out of business were such Main Street ventures as Gildner’s men’s store and a two-story Woolworth’s.

Local police commented only that they had no reports of violence due to the strike, though P-9 members felt that the authorities had made clear which side they were on with the arrest of union member Bob Johnson for making “terroristic” bomb threats.² Local social-welfare agencies were also seen as supporting Hormel: The Victim Crisis Center, for example, was headed by a city councilman who had taken very public positions against the local’s campaign, while the United Way, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army all depended upon Hormel Foundation money for their existence.

P-9 and United Support Group bannering at First Bank Austin brought out open hostility from passersby. “Nobody had more trouble bannering than Mom,” recalled Jeannie Bambrick. “She’d get headaches and bawl afterwards, because all of a sudden people you didn’t even know would curse you right on the street. We were brought up to turn the other cheek.”³

And most area churches were hostile to the strikers. “They abandoned us,” said Vicky Guyette some months later. “They stabbed us in the back—a lot of us are saying the churches don’t seem the same as the ones we grew up with.”⁴

Faced with such division and pressure from others in Austin, P-9 members came to depend upon institutions of their own invention and upon a few loyal established institutions. With these they created a new community.

The weekly United Support Group meetings ceased to be predominantly female gatherings made up of supporters rather than workers and became instead meetings open to all, including P-9 members, relatives, children, and anyone who had a word of encouragement. Most people took this change for granted, though some women felt that something had been given away. Vicky Guyette recalled: “After the strike started, we lost something. Women weren’t getting together separately. We no longer had our own private space, a place we could cry and carry on. Our meetings just turned into union meetings; it was hard to keep the two separate. In a way something died.”⁵

These meetings were a source of wonder to every outsider who viewed them. Unionists from big cities, accustomed to poor attendance at monthly meetings, saw hundreds of men and women file into P-9’s hall (virtually every night of the week as the crisis became more acute) to share each other’s company and find out the latest developments. Marxist students who came in from across the country saw the working class behaving as they had imagined it someday would. True believers from a hodgepodge of fringe callings saw in the gatherings a chance to reach the kind of audience they had always dreamed of.

“You got to the point where it was in your blood” is how Jeannie Bambrick described it. “One night you might think that you should just take it easy and relax. But after you’d eat and do the dishes, you’d look at the clock and say, ‘Let’s go down to the hall and find out what’s going on.’ My husband Mike and I began to take turns after a while.”⁶

Just about anyone could and did speak before such meetings. Members of the Communications Committee reported on meetings they had had with other union locals or citizens’ groups and how much money they had raised. There were reports from other committees, such as the food shelf and the stress-hotline team known as the “Tool Box.” The local’s executive board discussed the developments of negotiations (though when a particularly crucial vote loomed, an official union meeting would be held with only card-carrying members allowed) and communications with the International, other unions, and public figures. Speakers representing other unions and community groups were given a respectful hearing.

And the meetings were models of democratic procedure. It was over 20 years since the publication of Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron statement, and not many of these meatpackers had ever attended college—instead, they had gone to Vietnam or into the National Guard. Nevertheless, their key leaders and many of the rank-and-filers were members of the sixties generation, and like those students of 20 years before, it was an article of faith with them that the experts had fouled everything up. They believed that there was no real choice but to have the group discuss and vote on almost everything.

The counterpart of the support group and union meetings at the Labor Center was the more relaxed community that could always be found at a local tavern, Lefty’s Bar.

Lefty’s sits smack in the middle of a row of bars that lines the western side of 10th Street, right across from the railroad tracks and a dilapidated freight station. It is, perhaps, the prototypical “east side” bar: one room with a pool table, a case filled with dusty bowling trophies, and a worn but always working popcorn dispenser. On the wall behind the bar are Minnesota Vikings and Twins banners, union bumper stickers, and a sign listing “Charges for phone call lying: Just left—250; Leaving now—500; Haven’t seen—$1; Who?—$2; Not here—$3.75.”

On a busy night at Lefty’s, people might line the bar three deep, while a few would sit at the small number of tables and booths near the rear. But whatever time of day or night, there was usually at least a small crowd gathered at the front end of the bar, near the door and the television that was always tuned to news or sports. Customers drank Schmidts or Bud, and occasionally peppermint or peach schnapps. And conversation focused on the usual barroom topics—sports, local gossip, and of course the strike.

While union people went to other places as well, such as Red’s Hiawatha Bar or even the Colonial, which was not on the east side but downtown, Lefty’s was where P-9ers could be sure they would find each other, and where they knew they would not find company sympathizers. (No union people would go to Tolly’s Time Out, a “company bar,” and they had been raised to avoid shopping at a variety of nonunion stores—a cultural holdover from the strongly enforced consumer boycotts conducted by the IUAW.)⁷ After a union meeting there might be a couple hundred people crammed into Lefty’s, and out-of-towners who came for big rallies quickly learned that it was the place to hang out.

However, it was apparent to all that democratic participation and good feelings were not sufficient to support this community. Many weeks of striking had strained P-9ers’ resources, and $40 a week in strike pay did not go far.

Food caravans organized and paid for by supporters provided one answer to the material hardships. The first of these, organized by the group of Twin Cities unionists and union supporters who constituted the Twin Cities Support Committee, came at the end of August. The idea may have come from Jake Cooper, a supermarket owner and a supporter of labor causes since his participation in the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, though several other committee members who were well versed in labor history were aware of earlier efforts of this sort. In Cooper’s words:

In the 1934 strike there was a lot of food brought in to help the Teamsters union by farmers and other organizations. I was able to get food at cost, but there was also a lot of food that was just donated from other unions and individuals. A lot of the first caravan came from us, but from then on other caravans were primarily donations. Pastor Paul, a well-known Twin Cities figure who’s helped poor people, got an awful lot of food for us. We approached farm organizations, but I don’t think we got much from them. And we were in constant contact with UFCW Region 13, trying to pressure them to get involved, but they didn’t want to be connected with us. They saw us as outsiders, as something like “unclean.” They’d always say they would contribute on their own.⁸

Region 13 did contribute significantly to a fourth, mid-October caravan, as did the Twin Cities group. (Farmstead workers from nearby Albert Lea brought a second caravan in September, and on October 4, 60 Ottumwa members and supporters delivered $2,800 worth of food, paid for by local donations.)⁹ Comprising over 125 trucks, vans, and autos carrying more than a hundred tons of food, the mid-October caravan was to be the largest of the deliveries. The food was unloaded and stored in the basement of the union hall, and given out over time by a union committee. On the day of the delivery, the UFCW put out a letter crediting the “large dollar” contributions of meatpacking locals in Iowa, southern Minnesota, and Nebraska, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, and the Iowa Federation of Labor, among others.¹⁰ Following the food delivery, there was an outdoor rally from the local, featuring on the podium such uncomfortable allies as Region 13 director Hansen, Cooper, Twin Cities Support Committee chairman Pete Rachleff, and Duluth Labor World editor Dick Blin.

Another answer to the problem of material need came from the fundraising done directly by the members. Since August, small P-9 “communications teams” had gone out to leaflet and collect plant gate donations at factories across the Midwest. This effort provided firsthand information about the strike to thousands of other workers and produced needed funds. “These groups of three to seven people would drive somewhere and speak before church or school audiences,” reported Cecil Cain. “Sometimes they’d bring back a hell of a check.”¹¹

But it was Rogers who conceived of and organized several 50,000-piece mass solicitation mailings for the two funds that produced the most strike support: the Emergency and Hardship Fund and the Adopt-A-Family Fund. The first of these depended upon irregular contributions of any size from a variety of sources; money was used for emergencies such as heat shutoffs or dire medical problems. Solicitations for the latter fund, though, specifically requested that individual union locals commit themselves to contribute $100 to $1,000 every month for a period of three months in support of one “adopted” family. P-9 families who wanted to be considered would submit statements of need, which were then reviewed by an anonymous United Support Group committee that received only an identification number, not the name of the P-9er concerned.

"I’m not sure where the idea came from,” Rogers told me.

Certainly I’ve read advertisements with celebrities urging people to adopt kids in Third World countries. I had been thinking that this country contains more than 13 million organized workers in unions all over the country, and there had to be some way for them to help prevent the company from starving out the Hormel strikers.¹²

Over the course of succeeding months, these funds raised more than $1 million to aid the strikers. According to Cindy Rudd, one of the administrators of the Adopt-A-Family Fund, generally the goal was to make sure a family had about $600 a month. Among the unions that responded with heavy donations were the National Postal Workers, the Communications Workers, and flight attendants and machinists from Northwest Airlines, who turned over 250 checks totaling $10,000 to the fund. According to Rudd:

Some weeks we’d have 30 to 40 families adopted, each receiving a different amount according to need. Some people would come in crying, they were so happy to get their checks. Everyone was supposed to send a thank you letter, telling the funding local what their circumstances were. R. J. Bergstrom sent a photo of his family holding their check to the unions that adopted them, and Mike and Jeannie Bambrick made posters that they sent.¹³

•   •   •

In early October Governor Rudy Perpich called upon the district director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to get both sides together for further negotiations. As a result, mediator Hank Bell arranged for the parties to meet on October 14. Virtually at the same time, the UFCW sent the local a mailgram urging it “to re-evaluate your entire program, reassess the terrible price paid by Austin members, to reappraise your objectives . . . and finally to objectively reconsider how best to secure an acceptable resolution.”¹⁴

But nothing was accomplished in that bargaining session. The parties met for 90 minutes face to face, and then met separately with Bell and another mediator shuttling back and forth, for the remainder of the day. No progress was made; no further talks were scheduled. Hormel plant manager Deryl Arnold said that to his knowledge no new proposals were offered or compromises made. (He overlooked the local’s proposal to tie wages to company profits in a way that would guarantee Hormel its highest profits ever; the company rejected the offer immediately.) Guyette said that the company refused to move away from the offer that the local had turned down in August.¹⁵

Two months of striking had brought no weakening of the will of either Hormel or P-9. For its part, the UFCW International continued to snipe openly at the local. And the bank campaign remained a hot issue: Hormel filed a further NLRB complaint against P-9, this time citing demonstrations at First Bank’s Wisconsin branches. Before the NLRB’s Washington office could rule on the September settlement worked out before Administrative Law Judge Bernard, the regional office again found for the company and ruled the Wisconsin demonstrations illegal. All these cases would now be brought before another administrative law judge.¹⁶

With things at this pass, P-9’s leaders and Rogers felt that nothing remained but to turn up the heat: They began a serious discussion of extending P-9’s pickets to Hormel’s other plants, where struck work was being performed.

•   •   •

Other locals, of course, knew that it might be only a matter of time before P-9 extended its picket lines. That possibility had been mentioned over the summer prior to the strike on the several occasions when P-9 officers traveled to Fremont and Ottumwa to address union members there. Many of those union members thought that they might face P-9 pickets as early as August, when the large caravan traveled to Dubuque, Ottumwa, Fremont, and elsewhere. On that occasion, a memo from the law firm that represented several locals, Cotton, Watt, Jones & King, was distributed widely among the Ottumwa work force. This memo evenhandedly discussed the Ottumwa contract provisions that touched on the matter of “sympathy strikes,” citing section 6.4, which stated:

It is agreed that in the event an authorized picket line is in effect at the entrance to the plant, the Company shall not discipline employees who choose to honor such picket line. The Union agrees to use whatever influence they possess to remove such picket line from the plant.

The memo continued that it

is not totally clear as to what is meant by an “authorized” picket line but the most reasonable interpretation would presumably be that it is a picket line which is authorized by the local union which placed the picket line there and, if the International Constitution requires, by whatever International Union authority is empowered to give such approval.

The memo added that the contract might be interpreted by the Reagan-appointed NLRB as giving the individual protection, while leaving the union liable to penalties.¹⁷

After that caravan, P-9 members paid regular visits to the sites of other Hormel plants. In early October, P-9 members distributed literature to Hormel and FDL workers in Fremont, Ottumwa, Knoxville, Dubuque, Algona, Beloit, and Rochelle. Leaflets described P-9 activities, the details of the company’s implemented contract, and the union’s “preparations to deal with the struck work being performed by union members and with the possible re-opening of the Austin plant using strikebreakers.” One leaflet read:

DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE USED AS A STRIKEBREAKER Austin Local P-9 members are now in the 10th week of a strike. . . . Though there are indications that our strike is hurting them, the company claims to be unaffected. . . . THIS MEANS THAT YOUR LABOR IS BEING USED AGAINST US—AND IF THAT WORKS, THE COMPANY WILL USE OUR LABOR TO DEFEAT YOU WHEN YOUR CONTRACTS EXPIRE. . . . When We visit your plants next, we will have signs and literature that will make our intentions clear. At that point, ALL EYES WILL BE ON YOU: you will have the undivided attention of the meatpacking industry, the entire labor movement and the national media. . . .¹⁸

And on October 19, Austin members voted to pledge their support to any other union member who honored an extended P-9 picket line: No one would go back until everyone went back, they said.¹⁹ Afterward, Rogers set up a phone bank to call other Hormel and FDL members, ask whether they would honor such a line, and reassure them of P-9’s mutual support.

In Ottumwa, supporters circulated petitions encouraging the International to sanction an extension of P-9 pickets, and over 500 of approximately 750 workers signed. Similarly, in Fremont P-9 supporter Bob Langemeier got as many as 400 of his co-workers (in a plant employing around 850) to sign letters to Wynn urging him to grant the sanction. Unlike the Ottumwa contract, Fremont’s did not specifically address the matter of extended pickets; neither did it contain the customary ban on striking during the life of the agreement, in effect giving Fremont members wide latitude.²⁰

P-9 officers felt that they had won some allies in these two other Hormel locations at least. They also had an analysis of how the two locals differed from each other—and what those differences meant for P-9. As stated earlier, the Fremont workers were considerably older and therefore, one might reason, more conservative than the Ottumwa workers. Some also said that they were more privileged. “I always thought Ottumwa would be a stronger ally than Fremont,” said P-9 board member Carl Pontius:

I knew people who had gone there [Ottumwa] from Fort Dodge, where I worked before. I also felt the election of Dan Varner as steward—somebody who knew how they screw people around—was a big step for us. And I knew the history of the Fremont local—that they’d always been the first to give in. They made less money than others because they weren’t willing to fight, they just leached off what Austin and Fort Dodge could win for them. But Guyette felt Fremont would be stronger for us, since a number of former Austin people worked there.²¹

Many months later, Guyette said that perhaps he had expected too much from Fremont. In hindsight, he said, one should have recognized that over the years Fremonters had been made to feel that “they were the cog that made the company run,” and he observed that “Anderson always looked to Fremont to start the vilification against P-9.” But Guyette and Winkels had reason to expect support from Fremont, since it had been virtually promised them by Local 22 member and former Austinian Jerry Rosenthal.

Rosenthal, a hog-kill worker, emerged as the spokesman for the group that had been laid off from the old Austin plant and subsequently transferred to Fremont. His activism led to his election to the Local 22 bargaining committee. “He said he’d get everyone to honor any roving pickets and talked like this was something that had to be done,” Guyette said. “‘We’re stuck down here,’ he’d say, ‘Let’s make sure that the company doesn’t divide us.’”²²

Such grass-roots support led to what seemed for a while to be the biggest turnaround of the campaign: UFCW International president Wynn’s statement of support for P-9’s extended picketing in the absence of good-faith negotiating on the part of the company.

“We always thought that Wynn might be a reasonable man,” reflected Winkels. “We thought that instead of dealing with Lewie or Jay Foreman, if we could talk to the top guy, maybe it would be better. Everyone was looking for some ray of hope.”²³

On October 4, Wynn had telegraphed Guyette that pickets were not to be extended beyond Austin. But later that same month Guyette sought out Wynn at an AFL-CIO meeting in California, where he encouraged him to consider the local’s position and formally requested roving picket sanction. There followed a five-hour meeting in Chicago attended by the many Hormel chain representatives, including executive boards from Austin, Fremont, and Ottumwa. As many as thirty P-9 rank-and-filers stood outside the meeting. Guyette described the proceedings:

Not many people said anything. I remember that the president of the Beloit local attacked us as being selfish, and I said, “We’re committed to all getting back to work or none of us will return.” But the real turning point of the meeting came when Wynn found out that people were real ticked off. The Ottumwans delivered a strong message of support for P-9.²⁴

At the end of the meeting, the local and the International issued a joint public declaration that, among other things, stated:

The Local Union and the International are deeply concerned with the issues of health, safety, an effective grievance procedure, common contract expiration dates and worker dignity as well as economic matters. Local P-9 has pledged to negotiate in good faith and, in response to employer modifications in its final offer, is prepared to modify its proposals. If Hormel fails or delays in bargaining in good faith, the International union will sanction extension of P-9’s picket lines to other Hormel operations.²⁵

The announcement was heralded by banner headlines in Minnesota newspapers. “International union gives support to P-9” read the title of the Rochester Post-Bulletin account, which quoted Lewie Anderson as saying, “We are happy to report we are all of one mind.” “It makes us feel good to have this kind of solidarity again,” Guyette told the reporter. And UFCW press relations spokesman Allen Zack, who read the statement to reporters, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch that the decision to extend picketing “could come as early as tomorrow” and that it could affect one plant or “it could be all” of them.²⁶

"I believed it was real—everybody did,” said P-9 rank- and-filer Dan Allen several months later. “It sounded good,” reflected Guyette, who had information that the company was running so low on inventory that it had sent 150 management personnel in to run bacon bits, bacon, and Spam lines in the idle Austin plant. At the other plants, orders were being shorted, while workers were being told that they would have to work Saturdays and Sundays at double-time pay. “We were ready to send the pickets at a time that would have really hurt Hormel, during the Christmas rush,” he continued. “We thought at least it was a statement that Wynn would find it difficult to get out of.”²⁷

P-9’s new leaflet describing the accord at FDL and the other Hormel plants was entitled “UNITED UFCW TO HORMEL: Bargain or We’ll Shut All Your Plants Down.”²⁸ Then, assisted by mediator Hank Bell, the company and the union scheduled a negotiating session for November 15. It would be only the second such meeting since the strike began.

•   •   •

Union negotiators met with attorney Rollins two days before their meeting with Hormel to examine their position. Rollins said P-9 should make a reasonable new offer and reviewed the local’s chief concerns: maintaining the guaranteed annual wage and seniority; getting back to the pre-1984 package of escrow, insurance, and wages; on-the-job safety and the high production standards; frustration over the inert grievance and arbitration procedure; the term of the contract; and the union’s desire to reinstate a past-practice clause.

Perhaps the most conservative member of the union board, Keith Judd, said that P-9 must “make their position clear on the guaranteed annual wage.” The board as a whole was adamantly opposed to Hormel’s apparent desire to abolish this provision. Floyd Lenoch hoped that they could persuade the company simply to go back to the 1978 agreement. And Jim Retterath, whom Rollins later characterized as a moderate, John “Skinny” Weis, and Lynn Huston all agreed that P-9 should narrow down its issues to the most important and try to show Hormel that they were willing to compromise.²⁹

On the day of the meeting with Hormel, UFCW regional director Joe Hansen joined the union committee, along with International representative Al Vincent. (Almost two and a half years later, Lewie Anderson told me in an interview that he had been edged aside, since he was perceived to have a personality problem with P-9’s members and leaders, and other UFCW officers had been “slotted into the picture.”)³⁰ Hansen said that the joint Wynn-Guyette statement had “caught the company short” and that he would be reporting directly to Wynn as to whether or not Hormel was “stonewalling.”

At the meeting itself, Hormel spokesman David Larson’s opening remarks suggested little flexibility. He spoke as a stern parent, describing the harsh facts of life to a group of naive children.

The company was not greedy, he said: It had made $38 million in the previous year, but that was a pittance compared with the sums drawn in by competitors like General Foods, which earned $325 million, and Beatrice, which raked in $888 million. The offer on the table, he continued, was comparable to that paid by the top 10 percent of the industry, and he could not put company operations in jeopardy because of the union’s unwillingness to face reality. He also questioned whether the union was truly prepared to bargain, given its announced participation in the formation of a new, militant coalition that was having its founding convention in early December, the National Rank-and-File Against Concessions.

During the day, mediators Bell and Don Eaton shuttled back and forth between the company and the union, which only met face to face for a brief period. The mediators told the union that the company would not accept its proposals for expediting arbitrations or for using local ministers rather than professional arbitrators to settle some uncomplicated grievances. But the arbitrators did suggest a procedure for dealing more rapidly with the current backlog of grievances, dismissing some and submitting others for expedited, binding arbitration.

A subsequent meeting was arranged for November 21. On that day first Hansen, then Larson outlined the settlement reached at Morrell & Co., where a strike had also been in progress since late summer. That contract set wages at $9.00, and would raise them to $9.75 by September 1988. The rest of that day’s session and the subsequent meeting held on the 23rd focused upon “problem” jobs—those held by the union to be excessively dangerous and demanding—and grievance difficulties. The company rejected the union’s proposals for “baseball-style” arbitration, which P-9 felt would result in more reasonable opening positions by both sides, and for continuing the guaranteed annual wage. The mediators reported the company’s position: “That boat has left the dock.”³¹

Many months later Nyberg agreed to an interview with me. A short, powerfully built man who seems out of place in the expensive suits and Piaget watch he wears, he told me that P-9, not the company, was responsible for “gutting” the guaranteed annual wage, since the union’s original proposals so altered the plan that it no longer contained benefits for both sides. “Livestock comes to market in gluts, and there are other times of scarcity when you don’t need so many workers,” he said. “The old tradeoff meant that the company didn’t have to pay penalty pay for times when the raw material needed to get processed immediately,” and also that workers would not be laid off in slack times.³²

Such an interpretation seems opportunistic. P-9 negotiators had indeed proposed both time-and-a-half pay for overtime—the standard setup in most workplaces—and retention of 40 hours’ pay even when the work week was shorter, along with a 52-week notice of layoffs. But they did not stand firm behind the overtime demand and repeatedly argued for retention of the guaranteed annual wage. Had it wanted to, Hormel could have insisted on keeping the traditional guaranteed wage setup; instead, it opted for the “flexible” use of workers found throughout its package.

Before the day was over, Hansen would announce that “the company is doing what they need to do to keep Bill Wynn off their back.” Then Larson would tell the mediators that he was “recessing, not breaking off talks” and that in the future Hormel had to have not piecemeal proposals, but a complete package from the union, since the company already had an implemented contract.³³

•   •   •

At this point negotiations were interrupted by the hearing called to deal with new illegal secondary boycott charges. Rogers had led a caravan of 50 P-9ers into Wisconsin, where they had bannered First Bank Milwaukee on October 3 and First Bank LaCrosse on October 7.³⁴ The new charges, backed by the NLRB on the 17th, meant, in effect, that the previous settlement was scuttled. Hormel asked that the local be found guilty of conducting a secondary boycott and be found in contempt of Judge Devitt’s earlier cease-and-desist order.³⁵

All charges—earlier as well as more recent ones—were consolidated and became the subject of a three-day hearing before federal Administrative Law Judge Thomas Johnston. This hearing was more dramatic than the previous one, as union attorneys now denied that First Bank represented a secondary party: The relationship between Hormel and First Bank, according to union attorney Jim Youngdahl, “far surpasses the normal manufacturer-banker relationship to a degree that the two entities are indistinguishable for purposes of economic pressure by the Union and the labor dispute.” The union maintained further that its activity was not intended to sever Hormel’s business relationship with First Bank and, moreover, that its “bannering” and leafleting were protected by both the publicity proviso of the National Labor Relations Act and by the First Amendment to the Constitution.³⁶

To prove their case, they called two knowledgeable witnesses: Hormel chief executive Richard Knowlton and Corporate Campaign’s researcher, Tina Simcich.

The administrative law judge refused, however, to allow the union to call former Hormel and First Bank director I. J. Holton, limited the time period that would be taken into consideration, and cut off all inquiry into the Hormel Foundation (which also had bank representatives on its board) and FDL Foods as irrelevant. Since the hearing officer’s presumptions ran counter to the logic of “interlocking directorates” and shared corporate concerns, union attorneys were repeatedly required to narrow the scope of questioning and testimony.

Other witnesses, including Rogers, P-9 vice president Lynn Huston, and a number of investigators who had been paid by Hormel to observe and videotape First Bank demonstrations, preceded Knowlton and Simcich. In one case a videotape showed an investigator misrepresenting himself as a University of Wisconsin graduate student and attempting to get Guyette to say that P-9 wanted consumers to boycott the bank. Other investigators who testified included an off-duty deputy from the Dubuque County Sheriff’s Department and an employee of an Ottumwa security firm. Several noted that “the pickets desired to have passersby conclude that the dispute was between P-9 and First Bank.”³⁷

Rogers testified that “Hormel and First Bank are so connected and intertwined, so intimate, that you have to view Hormel as an extension of First Bank.” He described the union’s mailings, the informational bannering, and door-to-door canvassing as “our own advertising program, our own billboards,” and denied that any of this was intended to keep people from entering a bank, to get Hormel and the bank to sever their relationship, or to get customers to end their business with the bank. Instead, it was meant to get people to write letters, make phone calls, and “do everything that was lawful” to get the bank to use its influence and “stop being a rubber stamp” for Hormel’s labor policy.

Huston seconded Rogers’ testimony that the Wisconsin demonstrations were fundamentally different from the First Bank actions that had gone before: The union groups were smaller, and most were positioned much farther away from the banks—at least 300 feet. In each case, they said, only one person stood near the bank entrance handing out literature.³⁸

On the following day, the union called Knowlton to the stand for an hour and a half of questions. Attorney MacPherson asked whether the personnel committee of the Hormel board of directors reviewed company labor policy (Knowlton said no), whether the board had discussed the Austin strike (it had received “updates” at four of seven meetings), whether the board had discussed the 1984 wage cut (disallowed by the administrative law judge as untimely), and how First Bank System chairman DeWalt Ankeny got onto the Hormel board. Knowlton responded that Hormel always sought input from the financial community and Ankeny’s was among the best available. When MacPherson asked if there had ever been a period when there was not a First Bank official on the Hormel board, Knowlton said, “To my knowledge, no.” Nor, he admitted, had any representative from the financial community on the Hormel board not come “wearing a First Bank hat.”

Knowlton also acknowledged that “ultimately the board has the power” to establish labor policy. The CEO said that the Hormel dispute was never discussed at meetings of the First Bank Minneapolis board, on which he sat, and asserted that the Minneapolis bank had not been damaged by P-9’s activities. MacPherson also entered into evidence a story from the Rochester newspaper in which Knowlton was quoted as saying that outside directors “have a strong influence” on Hormel company decisions. Knowlton said that he did not think the quote was accurate.

After Knowlton came Simcich, whose credentials and documentary evidence provided the strongest part of the union’s case. Prior to her coming to CCI, Simcich said, she had investigated investment, tax, and personnel practices of large corporations for the Council on Economic Priorities and Corporate Data Exchange, both nonprofit research institutions, and for the United Methodist Church. Altogether, she said, she had conducted financial analyses of between 45 and 50 companies, including, with Rogers, one of the Hormel company.

During 12 years of financial analysis, she testified, “I have never seen a situation where a particular bank was so identified with a particular corporation through a multiplicity of different kinds of relationships, and the strength of those relationships,” as Hormel and First Bank. Calling First Bank the “primary institution” supporting Hormel, Simcich cited links between the two entities running back to the 1920s, when the board interlocks began and George and Jay Hormel put together the capital needed to save the institution that would become First Bank Austin from failure. In 1921, the bank in turn saved the meatpacker after some serious embezzlement by a high-level officer. It did so by forming a lenders’ committee that essentially ran the company. Simcich also noted that in 1981 First Bank Minneapolis and two other banks signed a major revolving-credit agreement and a $75 million long-term loan agreement with Hormel to assist in building the new Austin plant—a very unusual arrangement, since such agreements usually involve from ten to thirty banks. And she noted that First Bank managed the meatpacker’s pension and profit-sharing plans, holding a total of 12.3 percent of Hormel’s common stock in December 1985.

To make the case that any prohibition of such activities as the union had undertaken would represent a denial of First Amendment rights available to other kinds of groups, P-9’s lawyers called three leaders of anti-apartheid and farm organizations to testify about demonstrations their groups had held at First Bank. Then the hearings recessed. Administrative Law Judge Johnston required that attorneys from both sides submit briefs of their positions by January 9.³⁹

The conclusion of the hearings marked the end of the union’s campaign to move Hormel by bringing pressure on First Bank; although the NLRB would not formally find the bank actions an illegal boycott till February 28, P-9 now marshalled its energies behind other tactics.⁴⁰ How, then, should we regard the First Bank strategy—as a success or a failure?

First, we must ask whether it made sense to attempt to pressure First Bank, then whether or not the pressure brought the local any relief. In an article published only a few days prior to the beginning of the strike, Professor Ken Gagala of the University of Minnesota declared the entire corporate campaign a failure. In fact, Gagala discussed only the bank campaign, which he found to be inherently flawed:

Since seven of the 12 members of Hormel’s board of directors are members of the company’s management, the board is a rubber stamp for management’s actions. . . . let us assume that P-9 had been able to sever the Hormel-First Bank connection. Would the campaign then have succeeded? Probably not. Hormel, according to First Bank, has no long-term debt outstanding with the bank. Instead, Hormel issues commercial paper. Moreover, even if First Bank did hold long-term debt of Hormel, it could sell its Hormel loans outstanding to a wide variety of financial institutions, thereby diffusing P-9’s efforts to single out a secondary target. . . . If, in fact, First Bank is merely the administrator of Hormel pension funds, severing the Hormel First Bank connection would cost the bank its administrative fee for performing this function. But who is the loser in this transaction—First Bank or Hormel? Furthermore, could the lone First Bank representative persuade the seven Hormel managers on the corporate board to rescind the wage cut when the firm’s 1984 return on equity was below the median for Fortune 500 firms?⁴¹

In our interview, Nyberg made similar points, noting that First Bank was not a major lender to Hormel at the time of the campaign, and that Hormel did not have much debt or need for operating capital, so “the pressure points that could be applied there would not be effective.” Furthermore, he said, Ankeny was only one of 12 directors and could be easily outvoted if it came to that.⁴²

As the recent spate of corporate mergers and takeovers has shown, most boards are no more than rubber stamps for a corporation’s management unless forced by political or economic pressure to be something else. Hormel was no exception here. And, rhetoric aside, it is unlikely that any “connection” was going to be broken. As Simcich testified, ties between the two entities ran too deep for a real break. But Gagala and Nyberg’s strictly materialistic formula leaves much to be desired. It overlooks the meatpacker’s serious need for credit as recently as 1981, the key role played by First Bank in arranging for credit in that and other years, and Hormel’s need to maintain support from the institutions that had historically been its creditors in order to win financing for future deals.

“You have to look at the entirety of the relationship,” Simcich explained at the hearing. “And this is a case in which there are credit relationships, but there’s also a very major stock relationship, there’s a major relationship of interlocking directorates. . . . What is so unique is that there is a multiplicity of relationships at every level of the Hormel company’s operations.”⁴³ Such multiple and historic links meant that First Bank did have leverage to move Hormel, and that sufficient union pressure on the bank could have led to a squabble between Ankeny and Knowlton and a retreat by Hormel from at least some of its concessionary demands.

But union pressure was not sufficient to cause that friction. In a somewhat less than candid statement on the stand, Rogers said P-9’s anti-bank actions were nothing more than “advertising.” Clearly, under the heading of “doing everything that was lawful,” he also intended for unions and individuals to pull pension funds and remove other kinds of accounts from the bank. (In fact, as the administrative law judge and NLRB pointed out, one of P-9’s leaflets requested readers to pledge that “I and/or a member of my family are removing our accounts from First Bank.”)

Not enough did: Before the strike, a number of Duluth building trades unions threatened to remove their funds; a Graphic Communications union local closed a $100,000 account; and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, one of the few statewide bodies to support the corporate campaign, also removed money from the bank.⁴⁴ On the basis of letters sent to the local and to area newspapers, it is fair to say that hundreds if not thousands of individual supporters also closed their accounts. But there were not enough clear and powerful signals sent to the bank. And because of the UFCW and AFL-CIO’s open hostility to the campaign, there was never a major institutional threat involving a potential withdrawal of millions of dollars from pension-fund accounts, similar to that which prompted Manufacturers Hanover Bank to dump J. P. Stevens officials from its board.

Some would argue that Rogers did not take sufficient care to avoid the charges of illegal secondary boycott activity. And it is true that during the Stevens campaign, he had chafed under the restrictions of ACTWU lawyers—demonstrators must not carry signs, or they must stand several blocks away from the banks and insurance companies, and so on. During the Minnesota campaign, he was under no such legal or bureaucratic restrictions. Moreover, since the local had fewer resources, he perceived a need to escalate the struggle more quickly, and so he tested the limits. He was only a year and a half ahead of his time: In April 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Rogers’ and P-9’s position that handbilling and other appeals that encourage a secondary boycott are not unlawful, since they are protected by the First Amendment. But that ruling did not come in time to save the corporate campaign against First Bank.⁴⁵

Somewhat in contradiction to his earlier analysis, Nyberg also told me that for the First Bank efforts to be successful, Hormel executives reckoned that the union would have to violate secondary boycott prohibitions: “Unless you got to the point where you urged people to do something to hurt the company, you wouldn’t be successful. Ultimately, P-9 did urge people to withdraw their money, and that’s when we wound up in court under federal labor laws.” And, as we have seen, the NLRB agreed with Nyberg.⁴⁶

This does not mean, though, that “the corporate campaign failed,” in Gagala’s words, since by Rogers’ definition a corporate campaign is a total campaign that “attacks a corporate adversary from every conceivable angle.”⁴⁷ This notion is seconded by the AFL-CIO, which goes so far as to refer to such tactics as “comprehensive” or “coordinated” campaigns.⁴⁸ Today, Rogers says that the local had accomplished a lot and was ready to move on to other things anyway:

The bank had the power to force the hand of Hormel, but I always knew that Hormel was cash rich and could withstand a fight for a long time. What if a quarrel broke out on the board, and Hormel stonewalled, saying, “We’re not going to settle this thing right away, and we don’t need your credit now anyway”? I figured we had to put enough pressure on the bank to alienate them from the company, so that when we shut the other plants down, First Bank would then refuse to come to the aid of Hormel. And after we’d made such an example of First Bank, no other financial operation would want to take its place—they wouldn’t want to get into the same hot water.

As evidence that worker-to-worker solidarity was always primary in his thinking, Rogers also points out that, at his urging, P-9 began its efforts at solidarity building two months before it began any bank activities.⁴⁹

Whether or not things were moving so exactly according to plan, P-9 was, by early December, focusing more than ever on hitting the company directly. With, it appeared, the momentary blessing of the UFCW and a growing level of support from rank-and-file workers, victory seemed more possible than ever.