V

AMBUSHED

Union brothers I have many,

But you guys have touched me plenty. . . .

Kids at Christmas think of Old Santa

Mine came early from Billings, Montana.

BOILER MAKERS like you I will cheer

Next time I have a shot and a beer.

Thanks again for your time and your money

It makes these dark days a little sunny

—Letter from P-9 member Bob Johnson to Billings, Montana, Boiler Makers Local 599, which sent a $25 donation toward his legal costs¹

Five hundred union activists from 20 states attended the December 6–8 founding convention of the National Rank- and-File Against Concessions. Speakers included Pete Kelly, a longtime United Auto Workers dissident from Local 120; Ron Weisen, president of Steelworkers Local 1397 and an outspoken opponent of that union’s capitulation to the steel industry’s program of disinvestment; Maralee Smith of the steering committee of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union; and David Patterson, director of Steelworkers District 6 in Ontario. Also on hand were veterans of some of the toughest labor fights of recent years: the Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel strike; a shipbuilders’ strike in Bath, Maine; and the movement to save steel jobs in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela valley.

But the star attraction at the convention was the group of seven P-9 strikers. “It’s people like us who are going to decide if the labor movement is going to be past history, or if we’re going to put the movement back in the labor movement,” Guyette told the delegates.

NRFAC had come into being when the Austin union’s executive board was approached about participation in an anti-concessions organization in early summer. In June 50 union leaders from around the country met with Guyette and Rogers in St. Paul to explore the idea, and in August 168 participants attended a planning meeting held in Gary, Indiana.²

“NRFAC grew out of our strike and the general feeling that we needed labor folks all over,” Guyette later recalled. “One person knew somebody who’d suggested this in the past. I certainly didn’t understand all the political ramifications. It turned out that some people were involved because they wanted to contribute, and others because they wanted to direct and control such an organization.”³

The “controllers,” it turned out, were members of the Communist Labor Party, only one of the several left-wing organizations that gravitated to P-9’s campaign from its very beginning. The agenda of the December NRFAC convention had been arranged so that every panel and workshop featured at least one speaker representing, secretly, the CLP.

The Austin local’s officers and members were not politically sophisticated, and it was several months before they fully appreciated just what was going on. Pete Rachleff, chair of another group that had leftist members but was dominated by no one organization, the Twin Cities Support Committee, caught on more quickly. “In June I thought there was something genuine there,” he recalled. “But in December I found that the CLP controlled the convention. It was evident in the way they had limited the agenda, the way speakers were called on, and the way that the last speaker was always from the CLP.”⁴

Local P-9 could not have done without the left, broadly defined. In Austin and in support groups around the country, left-leaning liberals, nonaligned socialists, and some members of leftist organizations made indispensable contributions to the local’s cause—contributions that went far beyond local members’ expectations. In the words of Jake Cooper, a prime organizer of the Twin Cities committee’s food caravans and an open member of a small socialist fraction: “Before the strike broke, we indicated that we would help them, but they didn’t actually think they’d get much from us. We gave them a lot more than they expected.”⁵

And given the hostility of the official labor movement, P-9’s officers felt that they were not in a position to be too choosy about those who volunteered to be allies. Some union members reacted to Marxist propagandizing with angry anti-communist outbursts. But generally P-9 officers and those of us representing Corporate Campaign observed the old maxim that any enemy of my enemies must be a friend of mine.

In the weeks that followed, P-9 would lean not only upon support committees of various cities and NRFAC, but also upon activists from the country’s largest Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party. Current and former SWP members helped to provide legal assistance and to build union rallies and demonstrations away from Austin.

Rachleff would later call the NRFAC leaders “a bureaucracy in waiting.”⁶ The CLP followed the tactic of infiltrating the union hierarchy in order to take it over. In contrast, the SWP seemed to believe many if not most major union officials should be ousted. CLP’s politics were hidden, and its members engaged in behind-the-scenes manipulation; SWP members were open about who they were and relied heavily on circulating propaganda, especially their newspaper, The Militant.

Another Trotskyist group that was much in evidence in Austin, the Workers’ League, viewed the SWP (from which it had split many years back) as “revisionist.” The Workers’ League gave over many column inches of its twice-weekly publication, The Bulletin, to fulminating against them and other devils.

P-9 members, who had many idle moments during the long weeks of the strike, were inundated with such left-wing newspapers, including also Unity, Frontline, the Revolutionary Worker, and more. These papers, which frequently contained stories about the Austin strike, may have encouraged P-9ers to view themselves as overly heroic, but they also helped members connect with other ongoing labor battles and provided an antidote to the anti-union sentiments common in the mainstream media. Local members were also no doubt impressed by the rhetoric and leadership offered them by NRFAC officers and leftists in support groups all over the United States. But no left organization developed any substantial influence over the direction of the strike: P-9’s officers and members knew their own minds too well. On balance, the organized left did the local more good than harm.

Standing outside all this was the United States’ largest left-wing organization, the Communist Party. Though the CP initially supported the strike in the pages of its newspaper, the Daily World, in time its support for the UFCW and for Lewie Anderson in particular would be made clear. What is more, the involvement of the other left organizations on the side of P-9—particularly that of the SWP—offered the CP further reassurance that it should use any influence it had against the Hormel strikers.

•   •   •

I was not in Austin during the month of November, the first complete month I had missed since my first journey there in March. When I returned from New York in mid-December, it seemed to me that the strike could not go on much longer. Negotiations had reconvened, Christmas was coming—surely, I felt, both sides would find a way to compromise now.

But Guyette’s notes of the period show that the local’s executive board members were not willing to sink to the $10.00-an-hour wage rate that the company was stuck on. Of the 12 union board members present at a December 12 meeting, four voted to propose a $10.69 rate; three, a $10.25 rate; and five, rates of $10.75 and above.

That same day, mediator Don Eaton reported to the union team that “the company is at impasse” and “Larson says he must have a complete proposal from the union.” (Hormel’s demand for a complete union proposal likely stemmed from concern that its own legal position of impasse—and its ability to reopen the plant with replacements working under an implemented final offer—might be put in jeopardy by any acceptance of piecemeal proposals.) He also told the union that “a dramatic move was necessary,” although, he said, he was “not sure what was there.”

UFCW Region 13 director Joe Hansen contributed to the pressure on the board. Time was running out, he said, and the question was how to get a settlement. He emphasized that as far as making a judgment about extending picket lines was concerned, Wynn was “setting his own course.”⁷

December 13 threatened to be another nearly fruitless day. But, near day’s end, Bell and Eaton announced that they had been able to get the company to agree to certain modifications and clarifications. Further alterations were made on the 14th. Joe Hansen telephoned UFCW executive vice president Jay Foreman, who questioned him about the 52-week notice of layoff, the two-tier wage scale, and the expiration date of the agreement.

Hansen reported to the P-9 board that Foreman thought the mediators’ proposal was good. He added that P-9 members must be realistic, since “I don’t think you’re winning.”

Attorney Rollins said only that the “company had cleaned up a bit,” but that “tremendous ambiguity remains.”

Guyette scribbled in the margin of his note pad: “Washington, D.C. Tue.” He added, “changes in security, no guarantee all jobs back, no annual wage, no two-tier, 3-year contract, $10, .10 in 1987.”⁸

The Washington meeting referred to would allow P-9’s officers and UFCW president Wynn, Joe Hansen, and Lewie Anderson to go over the proposal together. The rest of the note is a pretty fair summation of the contract offer as amended by the mediators. The old contract’s seniority clause would be replaced by the cumbersome departmental seniority setup used in Ottumwa. There was no assurance that Hormel would rehire all strikers. The guaranteed annual wage was gone, replaced by a very restricted six-month notice of plant closing, and safety improvements would be made only when Hormel deemed them to be “reasonable and economically feasible.” On the other hand, there would be no two-tier wage scale: After a nine-month probation, new hires would receive the same rate of pay as everybody else. Job standards would be reviewed by a union-nominated and company-approved engineer. A few grievances would go to expedited arbitration, but virtually all past practices were eliminated. And it would be a three-year agreement, keeping the local’s contract out of sync with those at other Hormel plants. The wage offer was unchanged: $10.00, $10.00, and $10.10 over three years.⁹

“The mediators’ proposal was always misunderstood,” recalled Ron Rollins. “It was never the objective finding of a mediator that ‘this is how the dispute should be settled.’ Rather, what had happened was the company was at point X, which was totally unacceptable to the union. The proposal represented the farthest the company could be pushed. The mediators were as powerless as we were.”¹⁰

Pete Winkels noted, “The mediators’ proposal didn’t change much, from the Ray Rogers clause [banning “attempts to coerce the company"] to what it did to seniority. It failed to deal with any of the things that everybody felt were wrong from the beginning.”¹¹

But the UFCW had decided that it was enough. Bell and Eaton had gotten rid of the two-tier wage scale, the potentially pattern-setting provision most threatening to other contracts. And their proposal kept Austin workers at a $10.00 base wage for two years—the goal Anderson had always urged for the local. None of the rest mattered to the International union leaders.

Wynn did the talking for the UFCW at the Washington meeting. As Winkels recalls, “He said, ‘Boys, this is the best you’re going to get, and we recommend that you accept it. . . . we’re not going to give you roving picket sanction or draw anybody else into this.’”

Then he bounced out of there, and we stayed with Joe Hansen, who kind of sat there pretty quiet. We walked outside the building after the meeting and Joe was giving us a list of maladies facing the UFCW that would have been the envy of Job. He said that the strike fund was going broke, and that the UFCW might even have to take out a short-term loan on its headquarters building to replenish the fund. I thought, “What the hell kind of operation is this? It’s supposed to be the largest AFL-CIO affiliate union.” Later I found that the LM-2 [labor-management reporting] form shows the International has a strike fund of only $5 million.¹²

•   •   •

It was a double-cross, another double-cross, most members immediately decided. The contract reopeners and concessions, the 23 percent wage cut, the missing language, the International’s denunciations and regular attempts to undercut P-9 activities: Now there was no denying that Hormel and the UFCW had always been in it together.

“The rank and file elsewhere were behind us, and we were ready to send pickets,” Guyette later recalled, repeating the logic of the time.

Wynn had to move quickly to stall that off, because it would have hurt the company coming right before their big Christmas sales period. So we had a negotiating meeting as another stopgap for the company. Once the company had its Christmas orders filled, the sanction to extend pickets never came. Later, the UFCW took the position that they never would have given the sanction, since it would have been illegal.¹³

The UFCW helped to reinforce such suspicions with heavy-handed attempts to cut off the flow of Adopt-A-Family funds to P-9—funds upon which many families had come to depend. On December 3, Wynn sent out a letter to all AFL-CIO union presidents:

UFCW has not approved a request for financial assistance from other local unions in the AFL-CIO either by Ray Rogers or Local 9. . . . we are deeply concerned that any funds sent directly to the local would simply find their way into the hands of Ray Rogers and Corporate Campaign Inc. Clearly, after ten months of corporate campaigning against Hormel and First Bank, Rogers’ strategy has been a complete failure on all major fronts. . . . The campaign has cost the members in excess of $500,000 and, other than notoriety for Ray Rogers, has produced nothing but pain, disunity, and disruptions for our members in meat packing.

Wynn suggested that any locals that wanted to send assistance make contributions to the UFCW Region 13 office in Bloomington.¹⁴

But what really inflamed passions in Austin was the UFCW’s announcement that it would conduct a special mail-ballot vote by P-9 members on the mediators’ proposal. Region 13 director Hansen told P-9 members in a December 3 letter: “The International has directed a secure, secret ballot mail referendum to provide every member of Local P-9 with an opportunity to vote in reflective privacy, free of appeals to your emotions.”

Hansen’s letter stressed two themes. First, P-9’s members had demonstrated “courage, idealism, and tenacity,” but they had been misled by Ray Rogers into pursuing a corporate campaign that was “poorly conceived and oversold,” “inadequately researched,” and “doomed to failure before it began.” Secondly, the contract proposal was not perfect and was less than the members deserved, but “nothing measurable can be won by continuing the struggle that has cost you, your families and your community so dearly.” The moral: repudiate the corporate campaign; vote, privately, to accept this “honorable, if not perfect resolution and get back to work.”¹⁵

If the letter had not been situated in a larger context of perceived UFCW deceit and betrayal, more members might have been convinced. But in asking members to accept private ratification by way of ballots sent out from some distant, imaginably dishonest bureaucracy, he asked too much. Unlike some previous UFCW statements, Hansen’s did not directly attack P-9’s executive board, but the implication was clear: The local board could not be trusted to conduct a fair vote in a regular membership meeting.

Moreover, he said that the members must turn their backs on “the rallies, the balloons, and the cheerleading.”¹⁶ This meant that they must turn their backs on the community upon which a majority had come to depend. It was primarily that community, not the UFCW, that had kept members informed, united, and fed during the previous months. The majority wanted a ratification meeting in keeping with local traditions—a meeting where members showed union cards in order to receive ballots, and where they could find out what other members thought.

Anger and frustration over what they saw as conspiracy and heavy-handed manipulation led union rank-and-filers to strike out in an ill-timed action: a December 19 barricade of the entrance road to the Austin plant. Though only limited production work, utilizing the labor of supervisory and clerical workers, was going on in the plant, trucks continued to make deliveries, many not even slowing down to acknowledge the plant gate pickets. Union members felt strongly that nothing should be coming into or going out of the facility. Thus, on that day, almost two hundred members drove over to the plant at 4 A.M. and parked their cars and trucks in the middle of the perimeter road.

"Both the company and international are lying to us,” one P-9er told a reporter. “The international already has the vote tallied,” said member Mike Bambrick, referring to the impending ratification balloting.

As police cordoned off the entrances to the road known as Hormel Drive and began towing away vehicles, some workers resisted. One was arrested. The rest broke up the blockade at 8:30 A.M., after Hormel called off work for the day.

The members had taken care not to inform either Guyette or Rogers as they prepared for the blockade, and both leaders expressed surprise.¹⁷ Yet it was this small and strategically unimportant blockage that allowed Hormel to seek and receive a court restraining order prohibiting any blockage and limiting the number of pickets to three at each gate.¹⁸

A membership meeting was set up for December 21 to discuss the contract offer, and on that day the union executive board urged the more than one thousand members in attendance to reject the proposal, which they said was inferior to contracts at other plants.

At that meeting Guyette called the proposal a sellout cooked up by the mediator and the company. “The language is inferior to what we have in Ottumwa,” Local 431 chief steward Dan Varner told the members, also criticizing the pact’s out-of-sync expiration date. “All they’re going to do is pit one plant against another.” All executive board speakers and a great many rank-and-file speakers denounced the proposal.¹⁹

Winkels later recalled, “I spent over 16 hours going over the very confusing seniority language.”

The old seniority, which had taken 50 years to construct, was perfectly clear. If the gang got cut, it was “the oldest can and the youngest must.” But under the new seniority, if you got cut out of your job, you’d have to assume the youngest man’s job in the department, and if you couldn’t do that, you’d go out into the plant, to the youngest man’s job in the plant. If you couldn’t do that, you’d be laid off. We talked to Ottumwa, where they’d been working under this same language for seven or eight years, and they told us it still caused a lot of confusion. There, the company did pretty well as it pleased. What’s more, we had still had past practice governing seniority, and this proposal would have done away with even that.

Anyway, during the meeting to explain the mediators’ proposal I drew a diagram and went over as best I could what would happen in case of a departmental layoff or plant closing. Then I told them, “If you don’t understand that, neither do I.” We were looking at a situation that would only be clarified after one or two grievances took several years to arbitrate.²⁰

The local executive board decided that, in addition to the International’s mail-ballot vote, scheduled to be tallied on January 3 by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, there would also be a local vote conducted in the usual manner on December 26 and 27. Guyette told the press that if the members voted down the proposal in the local’s vote, the executive committee had approved a plan to send roving pickets to other Hormel plants in spite of the UFCW’s refusal to give sanction.²¹

Union leaders’ opposition to the contract proposal led Austin mayor Tom Kough to call upon both sides to sit down with former state labor conciliator Kenneth Sovereign and St. Paul mayor George Latimer to work out some changes in four areas: seniority, worker callbacks, the 52-week guaranteed annual wage, and the grievance procedure and past-practice clauses. P-9 leaders agreed, but Hormel refused. Nyberg said that the company “has gone the last mile with Local P-9.” If the mediators’ proposal was rejected, he said, the company would reopen the plant and invite P-9ers to return to work.²²

Wynn attacked the local for conducting its own vote in a telegram to the executive board, saying “telephone calls to headquarters describing a physical and psychological gauntlet that the members had to pass in order to vote in the local’s balloting only confirm our judgment.”²³ But four local ministers who witnessed the balloting described the process in writing, noting “we observed no attempts to intimidate and coerce, or influence the vote in any way in or near the polling place by any persons.”²⁴

The proposal was rejected in both votes. Both appear to have been conducted honestly, though a somewhat out-of-date International mailing list meant that some retirees and other nonworkers received mail ballots. The local announced its vote results on December 27, saying that P-9 members had rejected the proposal by 61 percent. In the International’s mail ballot, 755 voted no and 540 yes, as announced by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on January 3.²⁵

Hormel then announced that it would reopen the plant on January 13, and any strikers who did not return would lose their jobs to “permanent replacements.” Guyette said that the local would be sending pickets to the other plants, and that the company should “expect us anywhere.”²⁶

•   •   •

Christmas had brought yet another food delivery from the Twin Cities supporters: On December 21, a caravan led by Cooper’s tractor trailer delivered over twenty tons of food and toys to the P-9 hall, where a kids’ party complete with Santa Claus and a juggler was in progress. Twenty-four locals of various unions, along with the Minnesota Education Association, contributed to the effort.²⁷

But for many other observers of the Austin labor war, the new year brought only dread. With the company insisting that the local leaders had misled the members—“We feel Mr. Guyette and the executive board did everything they could to distort and discredit the proposal by the disinterested federal mediator,” said plant manager Deryl Arnold after the voting²⁸—state and local officials became very active in proposing a variety of “fact-finding” investigations and possible re-votes on the proposal.

First, St. Paul mayor Latimer and labor conciliator Sovereign met with Mayor Kough and the P-9 board. Nyberg greeted the news with the statement: “We will not allow outside parties to inject themselves into the dispute.”²⁹ On January 5, Sovereign advised the Austin city council that a settlement was possible if ambiguous terms in the mediators’ proposal were cleared up: He pointed to six areas in need of change, including the language governing seniority, use of temporary workers, arbitration procedures, starting wage levels, and references to the elimination of past practices. Sovereign asked that a committee of the council meet with both sides and seek changes in these areas. But nothing came of this recommendation.³⁰

Next, Governor Rudy Perpich recommended that a neutral fact-finder review the contract and resubmit it to a union vote. At first both sides spoke positively of the idea, and the company said that it would delay reopening the plant until such a vote was taken. But the idea was abandoned when P-9 made it clear that it would accept fact-finding only if that meant further negotiations, not simply another vote on the same proposal. State officials continued to seek out a mediator, nonetheless.³¹

On January 10, Nyberg and Guyette agreed to another meeting during a live broadcast of St. Paul public television station KTCA’s news program “Almanac.” Guyette pressed Nyberg to head up the Hormel negotiators personally, commenting that “the people we dealt with prior to the strike didn’t even know their own proposals.”³² But nothing was achieved in a January 11 meeting, the first attended by Nyberg.³³

It was the last chance for a breakthrough before the company implemented its plan to reopen the plant on Monday, January 13.

On Sunday, Pastor Henry Mayer of the Grace American Lutheran Church prayed for those affected by the depressed farm economy, the closing of businesses, and the effects of the strike, and urged that there be no violence. A three-panel cartoon in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune showed a worried-looking P-9 picket standing in the snow, an anxious Hormel executive, and a pacing Governor Perpich. Each character was thinking the same thought: “I hope Monday doesn’t come.”³⁴

That afternoon, three thousand P-9ers and their relatives came to the Austin High School to hear retired federal judge Miles Lord announce the beginning of an investigation into the Hormel Foundation. Local union members and Corporate Campaign had raised the issue of the foundation back in the summer, noting its voting power over almost 46 percent of company stock and the failure of foundation board members to act in accordance with the foundation’s original mandate to be a protector of the community.³⁵ A union study committee had continued to publicize the questions surrounding the foundation, ultimately enlisting Lord’s support. The judge warned that the legal costs of providing information that could get the state’s attorney general, Hubert H. Humphrey III, to act could run as high as $100,000.³⁶

At the rally, Lord talked at length about the foundation’s responsibility to the town. He pointed out that Hormel was withholding $800,000 in profit-sharing money from the Austin workers—money that had been paid at the other plants—“so that women and children will suffer.” Finally, he said what was on a lot of minds in the audience: “If you are not going back to work, you should all stay out.”³⁷

•   •   •

The reopening of the plant brought news reporters to Austin in droves. William Serrin of the New York Times, who had traveled to Austin for earlier rallies, came, as did a reporter representing the Wall Street Journal, several from the Twin Cities and Rochester newspapers, and a host of national and local television reporters and technicians. Minneapolis television station WCCO moved its satellite-relay truck down so it could send live feeds. ABC television reporters arranged to fly in each day from Minneapolis by helicopter. According to Police Chief Don Hoffman, during peak periods over 170 reporters, technicians, and camera and sound personnel came to town to cover strike events. “It was another case of herd journalism,” said Serrin later. “You got a gang of guys there and everybody’s saying, ‘C’mon boys, let’s ride.’”³⁸

The company had prepared a show for them, as had P-9. In spite of near-zero temperatures and darkness, a milling crowd of 350 strikers gathered in the icy field across from the plant’s south gate at 6:30 A.M. on Monday morning. The mood was optimistic and even cheerful: Since the injunction had limited the number of pickets at the gate to three, many strikers carried fishing poles, some with cardboard fish attached to the lines, saying that they were there to do a little “ice fishing.” Across the road, plant security staff were massed at the gate. But only about a dozen cars crossed the line. Local leaders later said that only seven members had crossed.

P-9 members told reporters that they were proud that so few of their members had crossed, and that photographs taken of those driving through the line showed most to be security guards trying to create the impression that members were going in. The company said that it would begin to interview new workers to take the strikers’ jobs on Tuesday.³⁹

That day, hundreds of cars from as far away as Florida, Wyoming, and California crossed the line to get application forms, and the company announced that over a thousand people had applied for jobs. (Pickets later reported that they recognized some drivers as workers from Hormel headquarters, who must have been told to drive through the plant gate over and over to contribute to the show.) Again hundreds of union members gathered across the road from the south entrance. Strikers yelled “scab” and “lowlife” at those who drove in but did not try to block their path.

A great many of the cars that crossed the picket line had Iowa license plates, encouraging the strikers’ dormant Minnesota chauvinism. Most autos contained more than one person, and some had as many as six inside. Either because of the drivers’ poverty or fear of picket line violence, there were many rusty, dented vehicles, and three cars were ticketed for having no license plates at all. One woman walked in, and another tried to climb the fence to avoid facing the pickets. After picking up an application, many tried to make a quick getaway: Hurrying to escape, one driver slammed into a police car.

"I’m desperate, I got to save my house and family,” a California driver told a television reporter. The same report caught striker Jim Getchell crying. “My mom and dad together worked 70 years for the company,” he said, “but Hormel just don’t care about our families any more.”

“It doesn’t end when we go back,” said striker Joe Stier. “They’re gonna be a scab and have to live with that—their families are going to have to live with that all their lives.”

Dan Allen, a firebrand who frequently drew the attention of the television cameras, said, “A lot of our people may follow some of these scabs home to tell them what our fight is about and how our community is being ripped off by the company and the foundation. But we’re going to try to be peaceful.”⁴⁰

And almost everyone stayed peaceful, largely because of the counseling of Ray Rogers, who insisted that strikebreakers were only misguided and unemployed workers and that P-9 should “take out its frustrations on the ones who are truly culpable.”⁴¹

“I had been to picket and had taken my boy along, just so he could see what his dad was going through,” Darrell Busker told me.

As we left, a guy passed by waving his application out the door, just rubbing it in my face. So I followed him to his house, and he ran into his garage and grabbed a baseball bat. “You get out of here, or I’ll bust you,” he said. But I told him I just wanted to talk. Gradually, he came over and talked. Then he looked in the car and saw my son crying. He just ripped up the application. “I can see what you’re going through, and I won’t take your job,” he said. The guy was on welfare, and from what I could tell, the welfare agency had pushed him to go to Hormel.⁴²

There were in fact many stories that welfare and unemployment compensation agencies in neighboring states were pushing people to apply for jobs at Hormel.

On another occasion, a carload of union members chased a car filled with scabs, doing 90 miles per hour down the highway. “We were in the lane next to them,” a participant remembered. One P-9er was “hanging halfway out the front window, shouting and waving his fist at them—they had to be doing 100 just to get away.” Again, only words were exchanged, not blows. When a “scab hunt” ended with the crossover’s car being surrounded, his car hood was pounded and angry words were exchanged, but little else of a physical nature ever occurred.⁴³

In fact, many P-9 members were saddened by the spectacle. But Hormel remained as belligerent as ever: That day it announced that CEO Knowlton was getting a $236,000 raise. Nyberg justified the move, saying that “it was the feeling of the board that his salary should be competitive.”⁴⁴

•   •   •

Union members packed the hall that Tuesday evening for a strategy session. Rogers told the gathering, “What you’ve done for two straight days is to show the company and the rest of the country that P-9 is sticking together.” He encouraged everyone to remain nonviolent, adding that it was certain that the company would soon bring in professional agitators to try to provoke a mob scene. Members reassured themselves that no one was taking their jobs yet; they were just getting applications. Of the seven who had crossed the first day, Rogers said, three had been persuaded not to cross on Tuesday.⁴⁵

Those who had crossed received hand-delivered letters, phone calls from friends, and visits from executive board members, all encouraging them to come back to the union fold.

But on Thursday the UFCW sent a public signal encouraging strikers to cave in and cross the picket line.

In his late December telegram protesting against the local’s voting procedure, Wynn had said that “if the proposal is rejected, we will direct Director Hansen to stand aside and let representatives of Local P-9 see if they can negotiate more than we could together.”⁴⁶ But there was to be no standing aside. Three days after the plant reopened, television stations and newspapers were reporting on another UFCW “telegram.” “Suicide is not an acceptable alternative,” Wynn wrote.

You may choose martyrdom for yourself. But as a leader it is your responsibility to make sure that 1,500 loyal and true union members don’t also become martyrs. . . . Your goals are unachievable. It is within your power to prevent the imminent total defeat and the loss of 1,500 union jobs in Austin.

The message also contained another refusal to sanction extended P-9 pickets.

Since, like other P-9 members, Guyette first got this message from the news media, it was clearly meant as a public denunciation of the strike, rather than as an executive board advisory.⁴⁷ Lengthy citations from the message were broadcast on television, along with a daily accounting of how many union members had crossed. On the day of the Wynn blast, Austin’s KAAL-TV said that 70 P-9ers had gone back and that, according to the company, 2,000 people had applied for jobs. (The next day the station reduced the first number to 55, while the Minneapolis Star and Tribune put the number at 80 to 100 at the end of the week.)⁴⁸

The next week would be pivotal for P-9, the ever-watchful reporters said. No longer merely interviewing, the company would attempt to bring in “replacement workers” to run the Austin plant, while Austin union members would be traveling around the country trying to close the company’s other plants.

But a weekend Minneapolis support meeting more correctly foretold that, for the moment, the action would continue to be in Austin. Guyette urged the several hundred people who turned out at the United Auto Workers Local 879 hall to bring down as many union people as they could the next day and each day that week. Four hundred fifty of them signed up for a “Labor Solidarity Brigade.”⁴⁹

At 7:30 A.M. on Monday the 20th, a huge traffic jam blocked all access to the Austin plant. P-9 members and supporters drove their cars onto the plant perimeter road, Hormel Drive, and switched the engines off. Minneapolis supporters carried UAW flags and American flags, and one even displayed a worn “Professional Air Traffic Controllers On Strike” placard. Anyone who tried to drive through the area found his car surrounded by angry protesters shouting, “Get out of here and don’t come back!”

Hormel videotaped and photographed everything. The only injury of the day was that of a Hormel photographer who unwisely confronted a striker. News reports said that he was taken to the hospital and released after being “kicked in the groin.”⁵⁰

That afternoon plant manager Deryl Arnold flexed his talent for hyperbole. “There has been a complete loss of law and order at the company’s Austin, Minnesota, plant,” he said, reading a prepared statement to reporters. “The police are powerless to control mob violence, mass picketing, and wanton destruction of property, and mob psychology has taken over. . . . We have called the governor and told him that the mayor is ineffective and the police not in control, and we have requested help from the governor.”

Documents obtained from the state Department of Public Safety reveal that Hormel’s Knowlton called Perpich at 9:30 A.M. to request that the State Patrol be dispatched to Austin in order to prevent violence and allow the plant to reopen. Public Safety Commissioner Paul Tschida and the governor’s chief of staff subsequently called Knowlton and Nyberg and informed them that the State Patrol could not by law be used in conjunction with labor disputes, but that the National Guard could be so used. A request for the Guard, however, must come from local officials “indicating that local resources were exhausted and not capable of dealing with the threat to public safety,” they said.

By 3:00 P.M., Tschida had received such a request in the form of a conference call from Austin Chief of Police Hoffman, Mower County Sheriff Wayne Goodnature, and Mayor Kough, a union member who could never decide whether to behave as a militant striker or as a neutral public servant. The call was backed up by a letter that alleged:

During the early morning hours, a citizen was assaulted at the scene. Several vehicles had their tires slashed, two windshields were broken at or near the employees entrance. . . . Another incident happened about 11:00 a. m. involving a new applicant for work who was followed by unknown persons that fired a shot at his vehicle. No one was injured in this incident. . . . We are beyond the point where we can handle this lawlessness with our resources.

A telegram sent to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension reported the same occurrences, committed by “a mob of 400 to 600 union sympathizers.”

In response, Perpich cited his “constitutional responsibility to protect the lives and safety of Minnesota citizens” and called up the National Guard.⁵¹

•   •   •

I was at the P-9 hall when I first heard the news. It was late afternoon, and the building was mostly empty. Ed Allen, his face flushed from the cold, burst in through the front doors. “The National Guard is on its way,” he said. “Carole Apold says she heard on the radio that they’re supposed to be here in about half an hour.”

It was a moment of great anxiety. Could P-9ers fight the National Guard?

Three hours later, a majority of the union executive board decided to end the strike.

I had left the building for a few hours. When I came back, Allen told me that the board had caved in, that he had heard that they were going to cut some deal with the UFCW. Union members were beginning to come into the hall for the nightly meeting. We stopped Pete Winkels, who wouldn’t tell us anything. Rogers, distracting himself with some minor organizing details, was equally laconic. Minneapolis support committee activists Tom Laney and Paul Wellstone were around and said to be counselling retreat. Guyette acted as though nothing had changed, and said he wasn’t giving up. But as we discovered by cornering other board members, Guyette and Vice President Lynn Huston were pretty much alone in wanting to continue.

By 7:30 the auditorium began to fill up as members and their families continued to arrive. Soon, nearly a thousand people packed the hall. Those who could not get a seat stood crammed into the back of the room and out the fire exit onto the street.

I drifted back and forth between the auditorium and the little Unionist office down the hall that Rogers had claimed for himself. I stood there waiting for some direction, some indication of what to do. Suddenly there was an explosion of voices, angry shouts, and the sound of furniture being violently shoved about in the big room. A dozen red-faced men—the so-called P-10ers, who had been vocal opponents of Guyette and the corporate campaign from its beginning—trooped by the doorway and out of the building. Drunk and cursing everyone else, they had announced that they were going back. The next day they would try to cross the picket line as a group.

The people who remained in the auditorium were far from being broken. Their determination to press on was apparent from the change in their mood from anger to joking good humor. What would the company do next, somebody said—use nuclear weapons? Everyone seemed eager to find out what the next thing would be, certain that they had not lost so long as the company had to keep raising the ante.

The executive board filed onto the stage late, and no one seemed to want to be the first to speak. Soon there was a lot of discussion, with members of the audience standing up and shouting out their defiance of the company, the UFCW, the governor, and the Guard. Should they all go back in together and, as some outside sympathizers were urging, “work to rule” until the other Hormel plant contracts expired in the fall? The majority felt that it was better to throw up pickets now at the other plants—the iron might never be so hot again. Finally, Winkels went to the podium.

“A half-hour ago I’d have said it was all over,” he began. “Now, I see that it’s not.

“This is the orneriest group of people I’ve ever seen,” he said. The hall erupted with cheers and applause.

Some months later Lynn Huston recalled the events of the evening. “There was some pessimism on the executive board at the time,” he said.

Floyd Lenoch was saying it was all over. Winkels was crushed—he really caved in. There was a lot of argument about going back in, and a majority of the board said we should just go back. At the general information meeting, the rank and file wanted to poll the executive board. Initially, Pete refused to sit up on the stage. Well, during the meeting we really hashed it out, and 90 percent of the members didn’t want to go back. We could tell that some members were missing at the meeting, and we knew that those were the ones who had made a decision to go in.⁵²

The events of the next day seemed to confirm the rank and file’s faith that P-9 could take on anyone. Five hundred National Guardsmen began arriving at 2:30 A.M. But when they went to the plant at 4 A.M. to take up their positions near the south gate, they found the union already there in force. The weather was warmer than it had been, and an eerie, dense fog lay close to the ground. The roads all around the plants were blocked up, hundreds of union members filled the streets, and those who wanted to cross had no way to get through.

The executive board had left Rogers to direct the action. But when he arrived at the south gate at 4:30, he found the scene frightening and chaotic.

The police had the corners cordoned off. There were all these union people milling around and running back and forth. The Guard, dressed in combat gear and armed with big clubs, kept arriving. They were doing all these fancy marching formations—probably intended to intimidate—and it looked serious. I knew National Guardsmen hadn’t behaved well in other situations, and I was afraid from the way they were acting that they were going to move on the strikers. I got ahold of a bullhorn and said, “If the Guard moves on you, head for the union hall.”

Adding to Rogers’ sense of foreboding were the questions asked by a couple of ABC cameramen just as he arrived. Had Ray seen Mark and Joe, the network correspondents who had been covering the story? The reporters had left Minneapolis in a helicopter at 3 A.M., and nobody had seen them since. It later turned out that their copter had crashed, and both men and their pilot had been killed.⁵³

I didn’t know about that, and when I arrived at 5:30, what I saw appeared more comical than threatening. Rogers was crouched beside a police car, using the on-board public address system to communicate with both the forces of law and order and the demonstrators. It seemed that even the police were openly admitting that the streets belonged to the people.

The results of the day were, television reporters admitted, “much the same on Tuesday as on Monday, despite the presence of dozens of National Guardsmen.” The pickets had prevailed, and at 8 A.M. the head of the Guard, the chief of police, and the union agreed to keep the plant closed in exchange for a reduction in the number of union demonstrators. There were just not enough troops, it seemed, so four more companies were called up. That meant that there would be 800 total troops there the next day to assist local police and sheriff’s deputies.

Plant manager Arnold continued to speak as if blood were flowing in the streets. “You are seeing the result of Mr. Rogers’ policies of confrontation, harassment, intimidation and threats,” he said. “Local P-9’s leaders and Rogers talk about nonviolence apparently with their tongue in cheek [sic].” Generally, his equation of the street blocking with violence—and an open plant with nonviolence—was accepted by the media.⁵⁴

On Wednesday, the Guard, State Patrol, and local police finally managed to get about 150 strikebreakers into the plant using a tool not faced by previous generations of strikers: the Interstate Highway system.

1–90 passes just north of the plant, and an exit ramp feeds into a street only a few hundred yards from the north gate. At 3 A.M. Guardsmen massed along the street, and local police on the Interstate directed those with orange Hormel stickers on their windshields down the exit ramp and in through the plant gate. Cars without the stickers were turned away from the exit. Initially outflanked, P-9ers caught on that the action was no longer at the south or west gate and attempted to block up the Interstate by driving very slowly or stalling their autos. But the State Patrol, supposedly barred by law from any involvement in a labor dispute, prevented P-9 “breakdowns” from blocking the highway. In two cases where union members stopped their cars, locked their doors, and refused to move, local police broke car windows, arrested the drivers, and drove the cars away. The south and west gates, scenes of the previous days’ activity, remained closed.

Union members conceded the setback, but maintained that the police were only able to open the plant by using terror tactics against the public and denying citizens access to city streets. The Guard, Rogers and local officers said, was acting as a private security force for Hormel and should be withdrawn. Taxpayers should not be footing the bill, estimated at fifty to sixty thousand dollars each day the Guard was in town, to run strikebreakers into the plant, Guyette added. Nyberg responded that since the company was “under siege,” it was appropriate for the Guard to be there. And Sheriff Goodnature moved the town a step closer to a police state with a note to Mayor Kough, which he read aloud to reporters on January 22. “I am taking control of the police,” he wrote, “and because you are a P-9 member, you will not be involved in any strategy sessions.”⁵⁵

Late in the day, a tractorcade of about a hundred militant farmers who had been at a protest rally in St. Paul arrived in Austin to lend support to the strikers. Giant earthmoving vehicles, carrying signs reading “Farmers and Workers Unite,” paraded past a crowd made up of P-9 members, leaders of the American Indian Movement, including Vernon Bellecourt, and UFCW Local 6 members from the Farmstead meatpacking plant in nearby Albert Lea. At about 7 P.M., just before the union’s nightly strategy meeting, hundreds of P-9 members and supporters decided upon a show-of-strength drive around the plant. At the north end of the plant, the farmers drove their tractors right up to a rank of National Guardsmen, who were still standing in formation.

It was the second dicey moment in two days, as union members and supporters left their cars and strode up to the troops. “Get out of here, just get out of here!” one woman shouted to the Guardsmen as they fondled their riot sticks. “Have we come this far to turn back now?” one man, not known to me, cried. Television crews turned on their spotlights and prepared for action. Then the demonstrators turned back. We had thrown such a scare into the Guard that the next day it brought in two armored personnel carriers. The cooler union heads had prevailed, though, probably because the majority felt that they had a better plan than fighting the Guard.

For P-9 had begun to move on the company’s other plants. A team of 75 Austin strikers had thrown up a five-hour picket at Hormel’s Ottumwa plant on Tuesday, and almost all of the 850 workers there stayed out until the pickets left. Truck drivers also honored the line, parking trailers filled with live hogs outside the gate. On Wednesday, contingents of roving pickets traveled to small Hormel facilities in Algona, Iowa, and Beloit, Wisconsin, where they were less successful.⁵⁶ These were only intended as a testing of the waters, further preliminaries to the real extension of P-9 pickets, which local leaders still said was coming soon.

There were strong indications that the company needed production, and that disruptions anywhere would hurt it. The Wall Street Journal quoted Knowlton as saying that “company inventories are ‘down to the bare walls’” and that “Hormel needs to resume production of its sausages and bacon” or risk losing business to the thirty other packers that were ready to grab part of its market.⁵⁷

Things were also moving quickly in the state capital. Twin Cities Support Committee members began a noisy and highly publicized sit-in at the governor’s office, demanding withdrawal of the Guard. It was widely appreciated that Perpich, running for re-election in a few months, could suffer politically as a result of his use of the Guard. The governor scrambled and got both sides to agree to meet with his fact-finder, Arnold Zack.⁵⁸

It was a critical situation. Each day brought another desperate battle. We seemed to be on a see-saw: One day we would be victorious, the next defeated; one day elated, the next downcast; and ultimately I just felt numb. In the back of my mind, I knew that if I were calling the shots, I would have given in long before. At the same time, things were moving so quickly—and those who were taking the biggest risks seemed so sure of their actions—that I hardly allowed myself to make judgments. Would the see-saw ride continue? And if it did, which side would be worn down first, and which would end up on top?