by DAVID MOBERG
Bucolic Austin, Minnesota, seemed an unlikely setting for one of the most dramatic labor battles of the 1980s. But during 1985 and 1986 around fifteen hundred meatpackers and their families tumultuously confronted the Hormel Company, a once-paternalistic business that has long dominated the small town. The intense conflict spilled over into the town, the national union, and the labor movement as a whole before turning back upon itself, dividing the workers as well.
These hard-working, normally undemonstrative mid-westerners surprised everyone, including themselves, with their remarkable tenacity, creativity, and social awakening in the course of their long and ultimately losing effort. Whatever else it may prove, the saga of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers reveals how much “ordinary” workers are capable of doing to fight for their interests, especially when given a little encouragement and guidance.
The Austin P-9 story is an emotionally charged tale of an uprising by workers who hadn’t struck their employer in more than fifty years. They faced down the National Guard, fought a hostile union hierarchy, carried their message coast to coast, and roved around the packing plants of Iowa and Nebraska, attempting to spread their strike to sister plants. It was a conflict that pitted whole families, not just the workers, against the company. Hardy Green’s strongly argued narrative of events benefits deeply from his insider role as a consultant to Local P-9.
But this story also raises fundamental questions about the American labor movement in the Reagan era and after—its tactics, strategies, internal democracy, and long-term perspective.
Meatpacking workers in the eighties faced a turbulent industry, with new anti-union firms undermining established companies, many of which were shuffled around in the paper chase of making and unmaking conglomerates. The marketplace mechanics were different but the effects similar to those felt by workers in industries wracked by foreign competition or deregulation. Wages fell dramatically; work injuries soared; the union floor of support, embodied in industry-wide pattern bargaining, collapsed.
Green focuses his attention on the union response. In theory Local P-9 and Lewie Anderson, the head of the UFCW’s Packinghouse Division, agreed that wage concessions did not save jobs but simply pushed everybody’s wages downward. Yet there were other leaders within the UFCW who were prepared to make concessions and did not relish fights with the companies. Also, Anderson was at best partially successful in persuading locals not to cut their wages in order to save their jobs, temporarily, at the expense of other workers. Eventually he urged a strategic retreat, attempting to set a pattern at a lower level.
Green’s account takes the reader to the heart of this important debate about union strategy. Why fight concessions? Can unions still attempt to take wages out of competition? Was P-9 right in refusing the strategic retreat, especially given what its members regarded as a failed local history of earlier givebacks and the understandings they believed they had with the company? Could an inspirational, successful strike become the model for anti-concession battles and organizing efforts throughout the industry?
Each step in the P-9 conflict was a wager, a gamble on how much pressure either workers or management could generate and how much of a counterthreat could be mustered, a bet on public opinion and the support of other workers. For unions there are as many risks in doing nothing as in trying too much, and the sorry state of the labor movement is testimony to the cumulative effects of inaction. Success feeds success, failure feeds failure, and the depressing climate for labor in 1984 encouraged many labor leaders to hunker down and try little.
But Hormel workers felt they had just grievances. So if workers decide to fight, what tactics work? P-9’s energetic, bluntly outspoken consultant Ray Rogers is famous within the labor movement for launching the “corporate campaign,” which attempts to attack the corporation on all fronts, not just on the strike picket line. But in the P-9 case, the corporate campaign also became a way of preparing workers for a strike, of involving them and their families in an active struggle, not a desultory display of picket signs.
Never sympathetic to the P-9 strategy, the international union increasingly undercut the local, eventually imposing a questionable trusteeship and attempting to wipe out the memory of what had been a model strike (even destroying a mural the workers had created celebrating solidarity with other struggles as far away as South Africa).
Unions like the UFCW represent a strange hybrid of democratic, decentralist tendencies and strongly centralist, autocratic qualities. Good union leaders can draw creative energy from this tension, involving members from the bottom up, fashioning as much consensus as possible, but respecting local creativity. They are quite rare, but at the local level young president Jim Guyette had many of those qualities, and even his detractors admit that consultant Rogers had an exceptional talent for motivating people.
The vision union leaders and members have of themselves, their organization, their movement, deeply influences the balance leaders strike between central command and local autonomy and their willingness to risk a tough battle. For example, the UFCW president has powers to block local contracts that undermine conditions for other workers, a power that was not used as consistently as it should have been. But it is a distortion of the rationale for that power to interpret it—as UFCW leaders did in the P-9 case—as a license to interfere with locals that want to fight for something better, something that was likely to help, not hurt, fellow workers elsewhere. Leaders with a vision of workers’ ability—and entitlement—to fight destructive trends in the industry would have embraced the P-9 campaign and used it toward their goal of a renewed wage floor.
Could P-9 have done better with different tactical decisions? Green intriguingly points to a critical moment when the local leadership was split and called off roving pickets that might have successfully shut down another key Hormel plant. Later they were unable to get the same support, in part because their international officers had organized against them. I still think that P-9 workers would have been better off moving their struggle inside the plant rather than letting Hormel bring in strikebreakers, but I understand how difficult it would have been for them to change strategies at that point. If the official labor movement had thrown its weight behind P-9 instead of trying to sabotage the strike, if the UFCW had supported the roving pickets at other plants, as strikers hoped, perhaps the strikers would have been proven right.
Even though Lewie Anderson opposed the Hormel local, he tried to adopt some of their tactics in later strikes. But Anderson was a man caught in the middle, too militant for many of his fellow officers, but unable to create elsewhere the spark that flared in Austin. Increasingly he complained about other union officials making local agreements that sabotaged the industry’s limited wage recovery in the late eighties. In early 1989 he was fired, and the narrow business union philosophy of many UFCW leaders was further consolidated.
It is easy to dismiss the P-9 battle as misguided romanticism, a throwback to the Wobblies (and it was an ex-Wobbly who led an occupation of the plant in the 1930s to win union recognition). Of course, not all workers are likely to join such crusades, and not all face conditions that provoke drastic action. But then few people would have predicted that Republican-leaning air traffic controllers or pilots at Eastern and United could become militant strikers either.
Yet in the end the labor movement relies on a continued reinvigoration of emotional commitment. Its roots lie in the belief of average workers that they deserve just treatment and a voice in their lives at work. Its ultimate strength rests on concrete expressions of solidarity among workers. Without that fiery spirit, the life and strength drain out of the labor movement, and it becomes a bureaucratic house of cards, easy to topple. Even the highest labor official in Washington ultimately depends on that raw emotion, commitment, and willingness to challenge the status quo among workers in the packing plant, office, factory, hospital, or whatever workplace. The spirit of the P-9 strikers is not all it takes to make a labor movement, but without it, no labor movement of value will ever be made. Hardy Green’s book captures much of that spirit.