VI

CLOSING RANKS

If you had to trust your life or your country to a scab or a striker, which would you chose? Ask the police and National Guard. . . . Stand strong and the worst that can happen is they take your job. Cave-in and they will forever have your soul.

—Letter of fired PATCO striker to P-9 members¹

“I’m still surprised about what I saw in that little meat-packing town,” William Serrin told me two years later. “I remember those farmers and the Indians, and I’m still surprised about the depth of what they were doing and the coalitions they were making.”

I called Rex Hardesty of the AFL-CIO, and I told him, “It’s just amazing up there.” He said, “Oh, naah.” The established labor movement was incapable of recognizing what was there and of building upon it. A guy like Walter Reuther would have been in there in a minute to capitalize on it.²

The farmers and the Indians were as excited as the Austin workers about their incipient coalition: Wabasso farmer Gene Irlbeck, who came up with the notion of bringing the tractorcade to Austin, told the gathered P-9ers that evening, "Farmers will not cross any picket lines.” Groundswell founder Bobbi Polzine, speaking at the same meeting, said: “I saw the sons of farmers and of labor on the National Guard lines. They’ve set blood against blood. It’s rotten wrong, and we’re not going to stop till we get them the hell out of here.” Then Chippewa and AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt declared, “The American Indian, farmer, and worker should lock arms and close ranks.”

Workers from across the country came to Austin to see what they could do and to testify before the always crowded nightly union meetings. Two women members of Nashville UFCW Local 405 told the strikers, “P-9 has opened our eyes; when we came here we told our husbands that we wanted to be with those people because they are fighting, and we want to fight with them.”³

The union local was receiving thousands of letters of support. During the month of January 1986, 250 such letters arrived, followed by another 412 in February, and over a thousand more in March and April. The majority were from union locals, but between a third and a half were from individuals who felt the need to reach out to the strikers.

But labor’s leadership wasn’t having any of it: Few union officials would “meddle” in the affairs of another union without first getting permission from the top—namely, UFCW president Bill Wynn.

So, although many labor officials must have been shocked to see Lewie Anderson, rather than a Hormel executive, debating Jim Guyette on the January 24 ABC News program “Nightline,” few said anything. It was left to moderator Ted Koppel to express his own astonishment: “Mr. Anderson, in the past unless a local really did something outrageous, the parent union would have defended it; otherwise the whole labor movement starts coming apart at the seams.”

To the likely puzzlement of “Nightline” viewers nationwide, Anderson stuck to his argument about the need to bring wages down in order to win a national wage rate. (Koppel to Guyette: “You heard what Mr. Anderson said—what he’s worried about is . . . if you guys in Austin move up too high, then all the other plants, those 13,000 other meat-packers are going to say, ‘Why not us?’”)⁴

But Anderson presented a less one-dimensional argument in a “Fact Book on Local P-9/Hormel” distributed within the UFCW and to the press three days earlier. There he revived the charge of “breaking with the chain” and cited the UFCW’s history of fighting concessions, while accusing P-9 and Ray Rogers of initiating an “unceasing hate campaign” against the UFCW that had undone organizing drives, encouraged disaffiliation, and helped to perpetuate an anti-union climate. P-9, he said, had bankrupted its treasury to embrace Rogers’ irresponsible position of “100% victory or 100% defeat.”⁵

It was the end of a week that saw the use of the National Guard against Minnesota strikers for only the third time in the 20th century. Still no labor leader of national standing had spoken out against the deployment of the Guard, and state AFL-CIO president Dan Gustafson had actually endorsed the governor’s decision.

Few labor officials ever spoke against Perpich—the UFCW saw to that. Nevertheless, the presence of the Guard encouraged a broadening of support for the local, and political opposition was building: The head of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party called his own governor’s act “politically undesirable.” Perpich seemed to have no idea how to get out of the dilemma except to encourage the fact-finding process and hope for the best.⁶

•   •   •

Local union leaders and Hormel executives met with fact-finder Arnold Zack on January 23 and 24, though Hormel discouraged any high expectations. Nyberg told reporters that the meeting was “definitely not a negotiating session—there are people in the plant who are permanent employees, and there’s nothing in any agreement going to change that.” Later he added that what was going on was “not negotiating, not mediation, it isn’t arbitration—it’s pure and simply fact-finding.”⁷

But P-9 leaders were treating it as negotiation, raising topics not dealt with in the mediators’ proposal and drafting and submitting complete proposals to the company. Zack asked union negotiators if the annual wage was a key, and Rollins called it “a threshold issue,” along with job security and seniority. Board members Huston, Retterath, and Kenny Hagen told how much the annual wage had meant to Austin historically, offering family security and a stable, nontransient work force. Rollins asked company negotiator Dave Larson why it was important to change the annual wage; Larson would only say that business was better served without it.⁸

With the board thus occupied, the members and Rogers were planning finally to pull the string with extended picketing. On Friday evening, several carloads of pickets departed Austin for Fremont, Nebraska.

Then the executive board flinched.

“Some of the board members had been in touch with their wives, who said their phones were ringing off the hook,” Winkels recalled. “Wives of the members who’d gone to Fremont were calling, panicky, to ask if anything positive had occurred in the talks. We decided to hold back.” Lynn Huston added:

We had so much trouble making decisions that we had given a lot of responsibility for the pickets to Ray. Floyd for some reason was afraid of sending out the pickets, and of course Keith Judd and Kenny Hagen were pissing in their pants the whole time. Jim and I really wanted the pickets to go. Well, the board decided they should go. Then Jim and I went off to the “Nightline” program. They talked it over some more and decided it was too rash, that we had to make a good-faith move. So, while Jim and I were gone, Pete called Ray’s house to get him to pull back the pickets.

Ray wasn’t there; only I was. I telephoned the union hall. Rogers told me it was too late—the pickets had gone, and there was no getting them back.

Rogers came home about midnight. At 3 A.M. the phone rang, and it was Winkels again, insisting that the pickets be called back. Rogers took the call and soon, with the help of numerous operators, had a four-way long-distance debate going between himself, Winkels in one Minneapolis hotel room, Guyette in another, and pickets Jo Ann Bailey and Cecil Cain at a 24-hour store in Fremont. The discussion went on and on, but the exasperated Rogers could not talk the board out of calling the pickets back. They had ruled, and a majority had gone off to bed. “The people in Fremont were real pissed off,” Huston remembered. “They had driven for hours to get there and were ready to go.”⁹

But, like the crippled atomic bomber plane in the movie Dr. Strangelove, some pickets got through anyway, as Jim Getchell recalled:

Five of us in one van got separated from the rest. We sneaked into Fremont the back way. We got to the plant about 4:45 A.M. and found about fifty deputy sheriffs and Highway Patrol waiting for us. The Highway Patrol lieutenant said,"Don’t worry about us,”; he’d remembered how Nyberg had said nasty things about them in the summer. Well, the five of us pickets kept over two hundred people out—they didn’t cross but instead went to the union hall. Then somebody from the caravan showed up and told us we were supposed to back off. We’d have had the whole work force. As it was, we shut them down for about two and a half hours.¹⁰

The memory of the incident still torments union participants, perhaps more than any other. In their minds it remains a golden might-have-been moment that could have turned everything to P-9’s advantage.

“I voted to pull the pickets, and it was one of the biggest mistakes we ever made,” recalled Carl Pontius. “But the board wasn’t 100 percent behind the idea.”

“The fact-finder had made a major pitch for a good-faith gesture,” Guyette asserted some time afterward. “Until recently I thought the board had gotten cold feet, but in fact they were sucked in. It’s too bad, because at that point the pickets would have been honored: At that time Rosenthal hadn’t been intimidated, but when we went later there was a tremendous change in attitude.”

Even Winkels, who led the retreat, now regrets the move. But he recalls that the board always tried to get consensus before taking any dramatic step. And he says that a number of board members kept holding back out of fear that too strong a union play might “hurt the company.”¹¹

Most adamant that this was the key blunder of the entire campaign is Rogers: “We had the whole thing in the palm of our hand, and the board threw it all away.”¹²

On Saturday morning, both the union and the company made noncommittal public statements about the fact-finder’s report. According to Huston, Zack had been unhappy about even the “Nightline” appearance and urged maintenance of the “status quo.” (At one point, according to Guyette, the “Nightline” staff called to confirm his appearance, and Zack took the call to say that Guyette could not make it. “He was real arrogant—with both sides,” recalled the P-9 president.) In order to maintain that “status quo,” P-9 went so far as to remove its pickets from the Austin plant, though 500 members and supporters from 40 other unions picketed the governor’s mansion in minus-20-degree weather. Zack’s report was to be ready in 48 hours for presentation to the union membership.

That evening the board told the gathered members that they should not expect a lot that was new in the fact-finder’s report. It would really only be another bite at the apple of the old mediators’ proposal that they had voted on before. And it was unclear how it would deal with the huge problem of getting rid of the replacement workers. In response, enraged rank-and-filers told the board to stop hedging on the roving pickets. They also voted to call for a nationwide boycott of Hormel products, in spite of the lack of International union sanction.¹³

So on Monday little attempt was made to block the Austin facility. Instead, 200 P-9 members finally extended the local’s picketing to five other plants: Hormel’s two other key slaughtering facilities in Ottumwa and Fremont, the FDL plant in Dubuque, and small facilities in Dallas, Texas, and Algona, Iowa.

In Ottumwa, it worked to perfection. Both shifts, comprising some 750 workers, stayed away. In Dallas, the entire 52-person work force also stayed out, closing down that operation. Fremont, though, was a bust: This time only seventy-odd workers out of 850 honored the lines. And at FDL, only 30 of 900 workers observed the line.

From Houston, where the annual stockholders’ meeting was in progress, Hormel executives responded immediately: By mid-day they had announced that 500 workers in the several locations would be fired and permanently replaced, in spite of the strong contractual position of the union members in Ottumwa and Fremont.

The governor appeared inept and powerless. He urged the company to stop hiring replacements and the union to “stabilize its campaign” until both sides had time to study the fact-finder’s report. Joe Hansen, silent since the mail-ballot vote on the mediators’ proposal, told reporters, “It appears they’re trying to spread the misery that they have created in Austin to the other locations.”¹⁴

•   •   •

“Right away we had 100 percent in Ottumwa,” Huston remembers.

People on the Ottumwa executive board and Dan Varner felt no more than 10 to 15 percent of them would honor the line. But Bill Cook told me, “Hey, we can pull this off.” That morning we let Bill and 20 other solid people know we were coming. We got our picket line up on the road by the freeway and had people with bullhorns at the gate. Bill got all of his good people to drive down there, stop their cars in front of the main gate, and block the road. They were the first ones there, and they stalled for time as the traffic built up behind them. They got out and talked to the people. Then they drove down to the union hall. And Bill was 100 percent right: Since no one in front of them turned in, each driver did not turn into the gate either. Nobody wanted to be the first to turn in and cross the picket line.

At about 5:30 A.M., Local 431 business manager Louis De-Frieze came to the hall, arranged for witnesses, and formally asked Huston to remove the picket line. Huston refused. De-Frieze went through the same motions down at the picket line. Then he returned to the union hall, and every 15 minutes got up and read a statement to the effect that members might lose their jobs for honoring the picket line. Each time he spoke, Huston responded. “We went through this about 15 times,” Huston said. But no one went in. Second-shift members came to the hall and also decided to stay out.¹⁵

One of the Ottumwa militants, Larry McClurg, said that there was a simple reason why Ottumwans honored the line: “A lot of people said, ‘We’ve been screwed for 10 years, and now’s our chance to get back.’”¹⁶

But in Fremont, the second picket in three days brought all the old frictions between Local 22 members and P-9 to the surface. P-9’s faith that, in Huston’s words, “the Fremont guys would honor the line for sure,” particularly the former Austin workers who were led by Jerry Rosenthal, proved unfounded.

A strong majority did back Austin, according to Bob Langemeier, but too little was done to keep their morale up: Months would go by without a visit from the Austin strikers, who worked a lot harder building support in Ottumwa. Meanwhile, the news media, the company, and local president Skip Niederdeppe kept warning Local 22 members that they might be fired for honoring any extended picket.¹⁷

On the first day, therefore, only 70 or 80 stayed out, with some of these calling in sick. That number eventually dwindled to 26. “If we had leadership here, we’d have been as strong as Ottumwa,” Langemeier continued. “Perhaps we did lead Austin astray, letting them think that they didn’t have to do much to get our support.”

Rosenthal did have a following in the hog kill, and he did lead some across the picket line. But the kill starts an hour later than other operations, so many had already gone in by 8 A.M. Meanwhile, he was at the union hall, pacing the floor. I always thought he was wishy-washy. He had been getting weaker and weaker, in the end becoming a spy for Niederdeppe. Finally he said, “I guess we got to do it.”¹⁸

After Rosenthal went in, “it was like an avalanche,” noted Winkels. “Everybody was looking for someone from the board leadership to support us, but when it got down to it, nobody did. You didn’t have a rebellious executive board there, just a rebellious faction with nobody in control.”¹⁹

In Dallas and Algona, local union officers encouraged the members to go back in, which they did after being threatened with firing. In Dubuque, Business Agent Mel Moss also urged members to cross. The surprising thing at these locations is not how many crossed, but that anyone stayed out given the absence of strong, pro-striker leaders. Nevertheless, by Tuesday pickets were up at four more Hormel plants: Houston, Texas; Stockton, California; Renton, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. And on Wednesday, Perpich began withdrawing the National Guard from Austin.²⁰

•   •   •

The shutdown in Ottumwa energized the Austin strikers, and the subsequent firings established a bond between the two locals. The events also sent Shockwaves through the labor and farmer communities in Iowa and set up a second center of strike activity.

On January 29, over two thousand family members and supporters of the Hormel workers marched through the streets of Ottumwa to demonstrate in front of the plant. (Workers who had honored the picket were instructed by their lawyers not to march, so they watched from the sidelines.) Demonstrators included UAW members from the local John Deere works, Teamsters, Steel workers, city workers, Hormel and Morrell retirees, fifty P-9 members, and Mayor Jerry Parker.

“If Hormel is going to be an integral part of this community,” the mayor said, “they’ll have to take these workers back.” Signs read “Stand together and fight for what is right” and “Citizens of Ottumwa support working people.”

Local 431 members began building committees like those in Austin: They established a food committee to feed those honoring the picket line, set up a kitchen and child care facilities at their union hall, and sent the faithful to Fremont to urge support for the picket line there. The Ottumwa citizenry showed greater backing for the union than did those in Austin: Reverend James Grubb allowed P-9 pickets to sleep on the basement floor in Sacred Heart Church, and many grocery stores began spontaneously removing Hormel products from their shelves.

On the day of the march, from the company stockholders’ meeting in Texas (also attended by Guyette and about thirty strikers), CEO Knowlton said that the company would review all the cases and would probably reinstate some of those fired.²¹

The extended picketing also prompted another outburst from Wynn in the form of a telegram to all union locals: “I strongly urge you to inform every member of the consequences of risking their jobs in order to help Rogers save face,” he wrote.²²

Then the UFCW did something more than verbally attack the strikers and their backers. It sent in a “special organizing team” to Hormel locations across the Midwest. Ostensibly, the team was sent to help file grievances for and provide assistance to those who were replaced or disciplined for honoring the Austin lines.²³ But in time “the program,” as some team members referred to their work, became primarily concerned with spying on strike activities, with the ultimate goal of placing the Austin local in trusteeship and breaking the strike.

Later trusteeship hearings would reveal that beginning on January 31, organizers from as far away as San Francisco and Massachusetts were sent to Austin, Algona, Ottumwa, and Fremont. These representatives reported to the assistant to the International director of organizing, Larry Kohlman, who moved between Washington and the Region 13 headquarters near Minneapolis. Operations were overseen from afar by Organizing Director Doug Dority and Executive Vice Presidents William Olwell and Jay Foreman.

Most of the reps testified that they were in Algona, Fremont, and Austin to “return phone calls” and help union members in need of assistance with unemployment insurance and getting on Hormel’s recall list. When pressed, though, one admitted that he could not really “answer a lot of questions about unemployment.” Representative Larry Plumb avouched that as early as the first week of February he was sent by Joe Hansen to “witness pickets in Austin.”

The six to eight organizers who spent time in Austin also acknowledged that they were in frequent contact with former P-9 business agent Richard Schaefer and “P-10ers” John Morrison and John Anker, both of whom had crossed the picket line. Plumb, who was originally from Philadelphia, said that he and Massachusetts representative Bill McDonough met with Schaefer and the P-10ers individually rather than as a group. The contact with Schaefer was not a superficial one, though, Plumb said: They had spent enough time together to become “good friends.”²⁴

One might have expected the UFCW to be secretive about its contacts with those who had crossed over. It was not. On January 24, UFCW public affairs director Al Zack told the Austin Daily Herald that “it’s been reported to us by those strikers who have gone back to work” that supervisors are treating them much better and saying “they learned their lesson.”

Then Zack dumped a bombshell: He said that he had recommended the use of fact-finder Arnold Zack to Perpich’s staff, and he told the Austin reporter that Arnold Zack was his cousin. “I said that it’s going to be controversial. I said, ‘You ought to be careful about the name. It may cause some people some problems.’”²⁵

A few P-9ers rose to the bait and denounced the fact-finding process as another plot against them. Apparently, UFCW officials were ready to recognize the scabs as the new union, and thus wanted to ensure that the fact-finding process had no chance of success. The director of the state’s mediation services, Paul Goldberg, expressed fears that Al Zack’s statements would have this effect. He quickly announced that the International union had nothing to do with the selection of Arnold Zack. Later, Arnold Zack denied that he was any relation to the UFCW’s media man.²⁶

•   •   •

The initial picketing had failed in Fremont and Dubuque, but Austin pickets remained on the scene, hoping to persuade workers there to change their minds. “We only need to get one more big plant down, and the rest will fall like dominoes,” Rogers explained, repeating the hopeful logic of the board.²⁷ P-9 pickets also hung on at the small Beloit, Renton, and Stockton plants, where workers also ignored their lines.

Meanwhile, Perpich responded to the criticism from his own party—one DFL leader told a reporter that the Austin situation “is completely un-American, more like Eastern Europe”—and withdrew the Guard. (On the 28th, Mayor Tom Kough also opted momentarily to side with the strikers and unhappy Austin townsfolk and wrote to the governor asking that he “move the National Guard from blocking the city streets”; by the 30th, though, he was back on board with Hoffman and Goodnature, urging that the Guard stay.) Around 380 of the troops left Austin, and the remainder were pulled away from the plant and stationed at the town armory.²⁸

As soon as the troops were away, P-9 shut the Austin plant down again.

At 4 A.M. on the 31st, over 400 union members and out-of-town supporters tied up the north entrance with a massive traffic jam. One woman attempted to climb over a fence to enter the corporate headquarters and immediately became the object of a tug-of-war, with union people pulling on one foot, crossovers pulling on the other. Although local police attempted to guide cars through the wall of strikers, few strikebreakers were able to enter the plant. The company never declared the facility closed, but police soon began turning strikebreakers away, and security guards locked the gate.²⁹

Police Chief Don Hoffman said that the troops should return. Sheriff Wayne Goodnature called it “the worst day of my life,” the first time he had ever been unable to enforce the law. His exaggeration rivaling Arnold’s, the sheriff summoned up pictures of gunplay and death, saying that he had called his men back because “I didn’t want to lose a law enforcement officer or lose a number of strikers.” Knowlton telephoned Public Safety Commissioner Tschida, who was also visited by a group of company executives urging that troops be returned. But an aide to Perpich indicated that the governor would not again be manipulated by loose talk about mob violence where none existed: “The bottom line is always public safety,” he said. “It’s not the comfort of the union, and it’s not the comfort of the company.”³⁰

Hormel now maintained that it had 750 working in Austin, including 305 P-9 crossovers, and that it needed only 1,025 “to resume full operations.”³¹ Subsequently released hiring lists show that the company was hiring at the rate of 40 to 50 a day between January 20 and February 24.³² But the real question seemed to be whether, without the assistance of the National Guard, Hormel could keep open the plant it seemed to regard as vital.

Objectively, both sides were now violating laws. No one had been seriously injured in the plant gate incidents, so P-9’s lawbreaking really consisted of traffic infractions, violations of the injunction that limited the number of pickets at the plant, and possibly some minor destruction of property. Hormel, on the other hand, was refusing citizens access to the public roadways and denying them their constitutionally protected right to demonstrate. Referring to the injunction, the company entered a steady stream of contempt motions against the local, Guyette, Rogers, and a great many union members whom company attorneys attempted to identify in hours of videotapes shown in the courtroom of Bruce Stone, a semi-retired judge brought in to handle the issue. As attorney Winter recalls:

One motion would just begin to be heard, and they’d bring a new motion. They really focused on the few people of color in the plant, whether or not they’d been involved in any demonstration. We kept getting the company’s motions thrown out because they’d name people not shown in their videotapes. But their many motions made things monstrously complicated, and led to mass confusion. Hearings on the various motions started overlapping.³³

So certain of the primacy of its rights was Hormel that company spokesmen talked of the need to further limit the constitutional rights of the strikers: “Deprivation of individual liberties” was “one of the unfortunate tradeoffs,” said Arnold.

“It could be equally said that risks of traffic jams are one of the unfortunate tradeoffs of free use of public streets,” quipped labor reporter David Moberg. “The right of management to run its business emerges as paramount.”³⁴

The law, of course, belonged to the strong. Hoffman and Goodnature regularly said that they were not favoring either side. In the same breath, Hoffman would reveal his department’s bias, saying, “There seems to be a real loss of support here [for the strikers] . . . plus there are more workers going back to work. That in itself is going to determine how much manpower we need to maintain law and order.”³⁵

The same bias that equated loss of support for the union with progress for law and order led to police surveillance of union meetings and repetition of rank hearsay that placed union intentions in the worst light. Austin resident Denise Bahl sent the following memo to Hoffman:

My husband, Dennis, talked to a friend who attended the union meeting on 2-1-86. He stated to Denny that Mr. Guyette tabled anything having to do with settling the dispute and proceeded to tell the members that they were going for broke. They were calling in other unions for Monday morning and under no circumstances are the gates to open. They are done being nice. He advised the Local P-9 to stay in the background and let other unions take the lead. Arrests were not a problem as they would be RPR’d [released on personal recognizance] and out in a matter of a short time. . . . The governor will not release the Guard because of the pressure that the Public has put on him and he would be going against Labor. All they have to worry about is local Law Enforcement and they don’t have the people to deal with it.

This third-hand report was condensed, supplemented with the information that “Teamsters union have been in contact in the past and supplied lists of radical members” and that “union council now appears to be making all decisions; membership not having much say in what is going on,” and sent to Tschida and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension superintendent John Erskine.

In other memos forwarded from Hoffman to Tschida, policemen reported having heard that “some of the P-9er’s [sic] have some type of puncture or razorblade type object on the toes of their boots” and that “P-9 had bought an old garbage truck,” perhaps intending “to run a Hormel gate.” A report on a mid-February rally noted the places of origin for out-of-state automobiles, adding that “there was only one car noted from Nebraska,” a fact that “would appear to affirm the lack of sympathy for P-9 at Freemont [sic].” Police may have even tapped the union hall telephone: A word-for-word transcript of a phone conversation between Rogers and Minneapolis supporters, obtained from Hoffman’s files, suggests that such a tap existed by late April.³⁶

Documents obtained from the Minnesota National Guard show it to have been anything but a neutral “peacekeeping” force. Every army must have an enemy, and the National Guard’s enemy was clearly not just “disorder,” but Local P-9.

The Guard kept a log of each day’s occurrences, supplemented by observations and speculation about the union’s current strength, morale, base of support, tactical options, access to publicity, and fundraising ability. Between January 22 and February 10, for example, the log-keeper regularly observed that “P-9’s strength is continuing to dwindle.” On January 27, after roving pickets had shut down Hormel’s Ottumwa facility, the log notes that “increased activity of P-9 on several fronts will probably raise moral [sic] of P-9 members who remain off the job,” while media coverage may enable the union to raise more money. But on the 29th it says, “Sources report people in union hall are despondent.”

That same day’s log contains a curious entry: “P-9 remains capable of strong political influence, but this capability may be lost in the event of the illness of the mayor, if he leaves town, or if he returns to work.” By February 3 the union was said to be “grasping at straws,” and later in the month, “becoming desperate.”

No similar assessments were made of company executives’ morale, base of support, or financial health. No record was kept of their daily activities, nor did the Guard receive police informants’ reports of discussions held in Hormel’s executive offices.

Such one-sidedness was doubtless encouraged by the Austin Police Department’s portrayal of P-9 as virtually a terrorist organization. The Guard’s log frequently refers to the activities of “20 to 30 radicals” and “ultra-radicals,” a list of whom, it says, was supplied by the police. On one occasion the log alleges that certain union activists have purchased axes for use against crossovers; on another, that P-9ers may soon get the support of a representative of the right-wing Posse Comitatus; then it warns that “there are a few abandoned vehicles near the Hormel plant that are to be blown up for effect.” (None of these predictions, of course, ever panned out. The Guard also regularly received “incident reports” from Hormel’s private security, California Plant Protection Services. But not everyone can perceive the union’s terrorist leanings, the log says, since its members work hard “to deceive the public into thinking they are a peaceful, non-violent group.”³⁷

P-9 members saw the partiality of the local police, but spoke of this as if it were a matter of prejudiced individuals, not a problem of the larger system. For many months they did not absorb the larger lesson that far beyond Austin, the original promise of the National Labor Relations Act had been undermined in, as David Moberg put it, an era of “labor law by injunction.”³⁸ It seems now that local members’ willingness to go along with Rogers’ program of nonviolence grew less out of a belief in the effectiveness of that approach than out of a feeling that, after all, this was America and that some larger forces would intervene to make sure that Right and their rights would prevail.

On Saturday evening, February 1, 900 P-9 members voted not to vote again on the mediators’ proposal, as “clarified” by fact-finder Zack. Members were unpersuaded that a “seniority board” would resolve all the thorny problems created by new seniority language, and unreconciled to the proposal’s failure to address their original concerns.

This vote, and alleged threats from the crossovers (as reported by Goodnature) that they would use weapons to gain access to the plant, led Tschida and Perpich to return 800 Guardsmen to the north gate. There, on Monday, the Guard re-enacted their previous tactics, blocking off city streets and again escorting strikebreakers into the plant. Tuesday, Stone found both Guyette and Rogers guilty of contempt for violating the injunction, fining each one $250 and sentencing them to 15 days in jail. The sentences were stayed pending another violation.³⁹ In Mower County, obeying the law meant surrender.

•   •   •

Rogers determined that there was nothing to do but make an issue of the contradictions in the law. Civil disobedience had forced southern states to abandon their segregationist laws and comply with larger constitutional principle. Perhaps civil disobedience could force the abandonment of laws that said strikers must allow companies to fill their jobs with strikebreakers.

On the day the Guard returned, Rogers went to the Austin Law Enforcement Center and told the sheriff that it was obvious that other efforts would be made to block the Hormel plant. Fearful that the police might turn violent, Rogers was looking to work out an understanding whereby mass arrests would be carried out in a peaceful, orderly fashion. Goodnature chose to take Rogers’ statements as a threat and refused to discuss the matter.⁴⁰

On Thursday the 6th, Rogers led about a hundred union members and backers over to the north side of the plant at 5:45 A.M. This was not meant to be the blockage he had discussed with the sheriff, but rather a public testing of civil liberties. No one tried to block the gate. Instead, groups of five and six challenged the police by attempting to walk down the streets around and under the 1–90 exit ramp, and by assembling away from the gate area. After a while, individual strikers approached police and Guardsmen and told them to give way or else they would be subject to citizen’s arrest for blocking the public streets. Police, in turn, arrested and handcuffed Rogers. As he was being led away, Rogers announced through a bullhorn that demonstrators should “allow them to arrest each one of you.” But the police arrested only 26 people, none of whom were union executive board members.

“We absolutely didn’t do anything to justify the arrests,” recalled Rod Huinker.

There was the injunction, but also it seemed the police chief, Don Hoffman, was trying to interject his own rules. We had no plans of shutting the place down—we didn’t have enough people. A police officer let 26 of us go through the underpass toward the front of the plant, then he held the others up, saying, “Those who went through are going to get arrested.” Only then did they tell us to leave the area—I was the fourth to get arrested.⁴¹

All were charged with obstructing justice, a misdemeanor carrying a maximum fine of $700 and 90 days in jail. After a day of mulling over their options, Mower County authorities also charged Rogers with the felony of “criminal syndicalism.” Reading the statute to the news media, Good-nature stumbled over its archaic terminology. “It is ‘the doctrine which advocates crime, malicious damage or injury to the property of an employer, violence, or other unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political ends.’” Those who advocated such a doctrine, joined a group or assembly that advocated the doctrine, published, sold, or displayed any writing that advocated the doctrine, or allowed the use of facilities to those advocating the doctrine could be imprisoned for up to five years and/or fined up to $5,000.⁴²

Criminal syndicalism: The very words betray the law’s antediluvian origin. At one time criminal syndicalism statutes existed on the books of 23 states, a product of the latter days of the Industrial Workers of the World. While the federal government attacked that radical workers’ organization obliquely for its part in organizing resistance to World War I, in 1917–20 local legislatures struck head-on. In the words of the historian Melvyn Dubofsky, the legislation “defined almost every fundamental tenet of IWW ideology as a crime against the state, and hence anyone who advocated the Wobbly creed by speech, writing, publication, or display became ipso facto a criminal.”⁴³

In virtually every state that enacted such legislation, the impetus came directly from business interests in industries where the IWW was organizing. Hundreds were sent to prison under the laws, including Local P-9 founder Frank Ellis.

Minnesota was the second state to outlaw criminal syndicalism and the first to successfully prosecute under the law, sending lumberjack Jesse Dunning to prison in 1917. But the statute had neither been invoked in 60 years nor interpreted or narrowed since 1921. Moreover, it was virtually identical to an Ohio law declared invalid by the U.S. Supreme Court 15 years earlier. Statutes remained on the books in only nine of the original states.⁴⁴

It was Rogers’ first time behind bars. His clothes were taken away, and he was issued a day-glow orange jumpsuit. At first he shared a cell with P-9er Ray Goodew; then he was put into a cell by himself. Unlike other political prisoners facing their first jailing, he claims to have experienced neither a sense of embarrassment nor one of defeat. Instead, he announced that he would be on a hunger strike until he was released. “I didn’t want anybody to forget I was in there, and it was a way of declaring that the authorities weren’t totally in control,” he explained. He also used one of his two phone calls to tell Times reporter Serrin that P-9 was ready to carry its strike “into the summertime.”⁴⁵

Moderate bail was arranged for the arrested rank-and-filers. But Mower County attorney Fred Kraft asked that criminal syndicalist Rogers’ bail be set at $10,000. Though the judge set bail at $2,500, Rogers chose to spend the weekend in jail and be bailed on Monday, “in order to get some rest.”⁴⁶

•   •   •

The arrests signaled the beginning of a new phase in the campaign: From now on, it would be a struggle waged primarily against the judicial power of the state, which became Hormel’s first line of defense. It was, perhaps, the arena for which we were least prepared.

The local had a number of attorneys assisting with negotiations and the secondary boycott charges, including Ron Rollins and Rick MacPherson. Now, with the force of the courts and criminal charges being used increasingly against the entities Local P-9 and Corporate Campaign and against individual participants, more legal assistance was needed.

MacPherson and Winter were already working on the contempt motions. Austin attorney Robert Leighton volunteered to assist the local people. And the bizarre criminal syndicalism charge brought further help from New Yorkers Emily Bass and Linda Backiel, who, with backing from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, would write a brief against the charge, and Twin Cities attorney Mark Wernick.

At the same time, with the company announcing that it would soon have its full quota of workers, the problem of P-9 crossovers became ever more acute. Striker Ray Moloney told a reporter, “It bothers me real bad. I’ve got a lot of good friends in there, and, to be honest with you, I don’t know how I’ll treat them when I see them again. Some are guys that really fought hard when we started out on this rocky road—guys I thought would be with us till the end, and they’ve deserted us.”

The early crossovers had been weak and desperate people or opportunists like Bob Dahlback, an alderman and "P-10er” who opposed Guyette’s leadership and the corporate campaign from the beginning. Asked by a television reporter about P-9’s emphasis on winning “dignity” from Hormel, Dahlback beamed as if he had been the most steadfast of strikers and said that the company had learned its lesson. “We’ve got [dignity] now,” he said. “It’s a total different atmosphere in there. The people are more friendlier [sic], the foremen, management, and everybody you talk to. I’ve never heard ‘good morning’ as many times as I have in the last month that I’ve been back to work.”⁴⁷ But those who were now deciding to cross the line were a different breed: people who felt that they had given the strike their best shot and had simply been defeated; men and women who no longer had an answer for the wives, husbands, parents, and other family members who were insisting that they return to work.

“Shorty” Wilson was among these. A small man in a land of Scandinavian giants, he always came across as an agreeable and likable guy. He had been an eager participant in caravans and trips across the Midwest and had taken part in the Fremont picket that was called back and in the shutdown of Ottumwa, where he spent a lot of time. In early February, he was frequently at the union hall, one of those who would go along on any job that was needed.

When a lot of members began crossing, the local held a membership-only meeting at the junior high school to consider what to do. The executive board asked for an honest reckoning: Were people going to cross? Was anyone going to cross? Of the 1,000 P-9ers there, no one spoke in favor of going in. Many spoke passionately for sticking together and staying out, among them Wilson, who said that Austin now had a grave obligation to stand behind the Ottumwans.⁴⁸

The last time I saw him he gave me a lift from my house to the union hall. He didn’t have a lot to say—we talked about how rotten the cold was—but he seemed untroubled. Two days later I heard he had gone back. It was nearly impossible to believe: I could still envision him outside the Ottumwa plant the previous August, waving his P-9 cap and cheering as passing trucks honked their horns in solidarity.

“I couldn’t believe it, but I’d noticed he was getting discouraged during the caravan to Milwaukee,” recalled Rod Huinker, who had known Shorty well. “Like a lot of people, he was pressured by his family. A lot were given an ultimatum: Either go back to work, or pack your bag.”⁴⁹

Another crossover, whom reporter David Moberg referred to only as Roger, said, “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, going across that picket line, but number one is your family.” Ironically, Roger had not been convinced by the International’s indictment of the strike as a suicide mission. Rather, he felt that he had to admit the local had lost because Wynn, not Jim Guyette, was the UFCW president—and the International had sold the members “down the river.” Moreover, a physical disability, common among Hormel veterans, made Roger fearful that he might never get another job.⁵⁰

Furthermore, regardless of the rhetoric of Groundswell and other farm organizations’ leaders, the farm crisis played its part in compelling formerly loyal P-9ers to cross. Some had gone to work in the plant in the first place in order to save their less-than-flourishing farms. Then they were whipsawed by the wage cut and by the effects of being on strike. They had started off in a bind, and things just kept getting tougher.

As soon as they went in, each man became just another “lowlife” in the rhetoric of the most ardent unionists, just another goddam scab. But it could never be that easy: The strikers who had been friends of those who were now abandoning the union community were inevitably left questioning the wisdom of continuing the fight.

P-9 negotiators had held back from reducing their wage demand below $10.69. But on February 11 they succumbed to the logic that said compromise could come only on the company’s terms. The union proposed a one-year contract with a $10.05 wage rate, accompanied by amnesty for all strikers, everyone returning to work in Austin, Ottumwa, and elsewhere, and all legal actions being dropped. But it insisted on keeping the annual wage and old seniority language, and asked for expedited grievances and baseball-type arbitration on work schedules and standards.

The company said no. The permanent replacements were indeed permanent—the union would have to negotiate its people back as vacancies occurred. Moreover, there would be no annual wage, Hormel would have to think about dropping the legal actions, and the contract would be for three years, leaving Austin out of sync with the rest of the chain contracts.⁵¹

Hormel had made it clear that there would be no compromise. The negotiations had no result other than to provide Nyberg with an opportunity to gloat: Afterward he said, “It is unfortunate that union members have only now come to recognize the economic realities facing the meatpacking industry.”⁵²

Later, Lewie Anderson told me that “the company never changed their position.”

They felt that they had walked the local into position to clobber them, and at that point they had no desire to negotiate in good faith. And there came a point where the straight vicious bastards—Krukowski—ended up being substantially influential in the company’s tactics.⁵³

P-9 really needed a show of support from somewhere. USA Today announced that February 11 marked a “pivotal point in [the] conflict,” as the company reopened the Austin hog kill and announced that it had reached its full workforce goal of 1,025 replacements, including 450 returning strikers. (In fact, later-released company records would show that Hormel continued hiring until February 24.) On February 14 the New York Times would editorialize about “the strike that failed,” calling P-9’s efforts “less a labor action than a defiant shaking of fists at large economic forces” and quoting energetically from UFCW broadsides.⁵⁴

But labor supporters around the country did not believe that the strike was over. On February 7, a half-dozen officers of influential New York Teamsters and Communications Workers locals came to Austin. Their “fact-finding mission” was part of a New York effort that had been announced on February 6 by CWA international vice president Jan Pierce and 30 other area labor officials.⁵⁵

These “fact-finders” brought high union spirits and a much needed demonstration of reality: Their presence showed that there was somebody out there other than enemies. Bill Henning, an enthusiastic CWA local vice president, brought good wishes from Pierce and his union and announced that CWA locals would be adopting many P-9 families (over a hundred, Pierce would later declare). Henning and Bill Nuchow and Dan Kane of the Teamsters, among others, joined in the life of the P-9 community at the hall, in members’ homes, and at Lefty’s Bar. Then, along with 300 P-9ers, they traveled to Ottumwa, where 3,000 unionists, farmers, and community backers rallied on February 9 on behalf of the over 400 fired Local 431 members.

The Iowa town had become less favorably disposed to union goings-on in the weeks since the shutdown. Hormel had threatened to close its plant permanently, and company officials began telephoning area farmers to say that it might have no further need for their hogs because of the demands of greedy workers. In turn, the parish council of the local Catholic church told Father Grubb that he could no longer allow P-9 pickets to sleep on the church basement floor. The Chamber of Commerce took out an advertisement in the local paper thanking those few Hormel workers who were continuing to report to work. And Ottumwa’s town council refused to give the union a parade permit or allow it to use public auditorium space. The union members and supporters decided to hold their rally outdoors in a park in near-zero-degree weather.

Mayor Parker still stood with the union members. “I’ve read your contract,” he told the gathering, “and you have the right not to cross picket lines.” So did a large gathering of farmers. Dixon Terry of the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition announced, “We will not tolerate these divisive tactics to turn brother against sister, neighbor against one another.”

Representatives of 36 unions from across the state showed their colors. The UAW’s Iowa political director, Chuck Gifford, reported that his members were busy getting Hormel products removed from grocery shelves. The New Yorkers again described the support that was building in the East. Even Gregory Hormel, great-grandson of George A. himself, sent a letter saying, “It is sad to me that the company that bears my family name is acting this way.”⁵⁶

But even this show of strength was outdone on February 15, when 4,000 supporters from around the country—including a delegation of 30 from various New York unions—converged in Austin.

The day before, Judge Stone amended the December injunction placing even further limitations on plant gate picketing. At a hearing held to determine whether Rogers and Guyette had breached the earlier injunction for a second time, the judge announced that only three picketers and six other demonstrators would be allowed within a 50-foot perimeter of the facility. (In effect, this ratified the practice that police instituted on February 6, when Rogers and 26 others were arrested.) Then he said that he would send Guyette and Rogers to jail unless each signed a statement that they would abide by the new rules. Stone admitted that this was “a curtailment of your First Amendment rights, but there comes a time when a judge has to do something he thinks is fair.” Hormel’s attorney asked for immediate jailing under the February 6 stay of sentence. But Stone allowed Guyette’s and Rogers’ attorneys, Winter and Wernick, a week to appeal.⁵⁷

The amended injunction—and Hormel’s apparent need for it—provided rally speakers with proof that the strike remained powerful.

“Your struggle embodies the feeling of working people everywhere,” Henry Nicholas, president of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, told the over twenty-five hundred who jammed into the high school auditorium. “P-9 is enduring the crucifixion that will be the resurrection of the labor movement. It is the litmus test for organized labor.”

Nicholas was one of two labor leaders of national stature who braved the UFCW’s injunctions against getting involved in the Austin strike and came to the rally; Pierce was the other. Since his union was already facing AFL-CIO sanctions, because of disputes with other unions, Nicholas told the crowd that he had nothing to lose by being there, unlike Pierce, whom he commended for coming. He criticized the AFL-CIO leadership for not backing the strike, and he likened the injunction’s limitations to the curtailment of rights in South Africa.

Pierce had arrived in Austin the night before, one week after the contingent of other New York unionists. A tall and vigorous fellow-midwesterner whose smashed-around nose was the result of previous passionate stands for labor, Pierce later told me that he had expected the mood in Austin to match the wintry weather. He came because “it dawned on me that five years before we’d sat on the sidelines and watched PATCO go down the drain—here was history repeating itself.”

Instead of a broken and discouraged handful of strikers, he found a rowdy 2,500-plus throng of fired-up workers and their families. “I got choked up,” he said. “I hadn’t seen this sort of expression of militancy and union-building for 20 years.”

In an extremely emotional speech, Pierce told the crowd that when he had looked out his hotel window that morning into the cold, gray sky, he could feel Hubert Humphrey looking down with a tear in his eye at what had become of his state and the labor movement. He said he had been swept from that feeling to his own anger at the scabs. “I told them I could see these pigs who, if you’ve ever looked at them, have some pretty sorrowful eyes, and I thought how even a hog deserves a better fate than being slaughtered by a no-good, low-down, yellow-bellied, scum-sucking scab.” He quoted the late New York transit union leader Mike Quill, whose widow Shirley, had also come out from New York, to the effect that the injunction-wielding judge should “drop dead in his black robes.”

Then Pierce delivered the most emotional gesture of all: At the end of his remarks, he walked to the edge of the stage and jumped off, six feet down into the audience, where he began embracing strikers.

Other speakers found it a hard act to follow. On the up side, Ottumwa steward Dan Varner described developments in that city, where he said Hormel had hired only four replacement workers, though it claimed that over four hundred union members had been fired for engaging in a sympathy strike, rather than honoring an authorized picket as their contract allowed. Twenty thousand dollars had been raised by the “terminated workers’ fund,” he noted. On the down side, Frank Vit, one of the few who had honored the line in Fremont, said that there was “a hell of a battle” going on in that local, adding, “With the help of the good people of Austin and Ottumwa, we’ll get them people out.” Marsha Mickens and Bob Brown, leaders of NRFAC, which had called the rally, told how local support committees were building the Hormel boycott in Detroit and Philadelphia.⁵⁸

The rally gave P-9ers the boost they needed to continue with their only alternative—keeping up the fight. Two days afterward, Rogers organized what he called a “mystery ride” for union members and many out-of-town supporters who were still in Austin. There was no mystery about what they would be doing—everyone knew they were going somewhere to try to shut down another plant. The only mystery was where they were going when their two busses pulled out of Austin in the middle of the night.

It was Dubuque. The next morning, the 150 pickets found themselves in front of the FDL slaughtering facility there, upon which Hormel was now very dependent. And several hundred FDL workers observed the picket, thoroughly disrupting production.⁵⁹

In days to come, union retirees made themselves a regular part of the action, pressuring merchants to observe the boycott and traveling to the state capital in St. Paul, where they picketed state buildings and the governor’s office. “Workers can’t negotiate at gunpoint,” their signs read.

And five days after the rally, 300 children of P-9 families staged a walkout from school and a demonstration at the corporate headquarters. Carrying signs that read “We’re tired of Hormel High” and “We don’t want to grow up to be scab labor,” they demanded to meet with CEO Knowlton and, when turned down, moved over to the plant entrance, which they blocked until threatened with arrest. Later, the students announced that they would be going to the state capital, where they would demand to speak with Perpich.

The student protest was partly motivated by the prohibition of any discussion of the strike in city schools. Officials argued that the schools should be a strike-free zone to allow children some relief from the stressful situation. But they could not isolate these institutions from the larger social reality. In days just prior to the protest, several students had been given in-school suspensions for wearing P-9 buttons.

The student actions were extremely controversial among P-9’s ranks, with some disapproving union members hearing echoes of 1960s student rebellions against authority. The union executive board took a hands-off position. But most parents of the students supported them, and the kids themselves had no ambivalence. “It helped a lot for us to do this,” said junior Chris Klingfus. “Our future is at stake.”⁶⁰