II

THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST

We are in the battle in support of all unions and especially industrial unions. We will fight for farmers and workers and will aid representatives of them in times of trouble and strife. . . . We recognize that we are under a system which perpetuates wage slavery.

—First edition of The Unionist, newspaper of the Independent Union of All Workers (forerunner of Local P-9), October 1935

Gone are the dress rehearsals of civil war when workers moved into neighboring communities to help their fellow workers repulse tear-gas attacks. . . . From a fighting organization dedicated to remove ‘wage slavery’ the union has become an instrument administering the protective machinery established in the Working Agreement. . . . unless ‘something radical happens,’ workers are apathetic.

Fred H. Blum, Toward A Democratic Work Process (1953)¹

When Fred Blum joined the Austin work force in the 1950s in order to conduct his study of what he called “the Hormel-Packinghouse Workers’ Experiment,” he was astonished by the mutual respect that existed between labor and management. After the 1930s—when workers shut down the plant, chasing foremen off the premises with clubs and roughly escorting company president Jay Hormel out in order to win a union contract—and until the 1970s, friendly relations persisted between Hormel and the Austin workers. How, then, did this relationship come apart?

According to Blum, a number of factors led members to expect labor peace and take Local 9 for granted in the early 1950s. Although the union had a militant past, growing as it did out of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and winning union rights through a number of sitdown strikes, for years there had been no serious dispute between the workers and the company. Hormel worked hard at winning loyalty by giving workers the security of a guaranteed annual wage—originally a company idea, later codified in the union agreement—complemented by profit sharing and retirement benefits. Because the union had won “me too” contract language automatically awarding Austin workers whatever wage increase was won by workers at the “Big Four” companies that dominated the industry, Hormel avoided the strike wave of 1946 and the industry-wide strike of 1948. In fact, unlike other meatpackers and union locals, beginning in 1940 Hormel and P-9 had a perpetual Working Agreement of no fixed duration. It was occasionally modified, but for 38 years neither side ever terminated it.

“If I had to summarize workers’ feelings about the company in one sentence,” Blum reported, “I would repeat the words of a worker: ‘If a man is going to work for anybody else, it is hard to beat Hormel.’ . . . Disregarding minor variations in phrasing, it was the single most often heard expression in any conversation about the company.”²

Thirty-one years later, an older worker reminisced to writer Stanley Aronowitz: “No kiddin’, we actually looked forward to coming to work every day.”³

Security and money was, in the main, the glue that made the workers and the union stick by the company But there was more to it than that: From the late 1930s until 1978, the workers actually ran the plant.

The guaranteed annual wage—also referred to as “straight time” pay—ensured that every worker received a pre-set amount of wages each week and provided for a 52-week notice of layoff, guaranteeing that there would be no sudden interruptions in that pay. Blum described this combination as producing “a security unique in American industry.”⁴

Additionally, in a scheme worked out by 1940, workers received incentive pay for work done over and above the standard that was set for a department or work gang. At first, a gang’s only reward for finishing its allotted work early was the “sunshine bonus”: the right to go home early. Later, it was agreed that if everyone in the gang consented, the group might work longer and receive additional pay (figured on a group, not an individual, basis) rather than leave early.

This setup had the effect of taking away most of a foreman’s traditional authority. Beyond the team or departmental work standard, which was set in union negotiations, the gang set the pace of work. Union seniority took away a foreman’s ability to give out assignments to whomever he chose.⁵ And the union had a tradition of immediately resolving grievances right on the shop floor: “There wasn’t any of this ‘write up a grievance and have a hearing in three days’ stuff,’” recalled one worker. “Instead, you could go to the ‘bullpen,’ an office downstairs, and have an immediate meeting with the foreman, a union steward, and the employment manager, who would very often insist that no one left until the thing was settled.” All of this meant that Austin workers were much less easily threatened than other workers.⁶

As Blum perceived, the average worker understood this heritage partly as a gift from Hormel management—specifically, from Jay Hormel, who succeeded his father as president of the company between 1927 and 1946—and partly as something won by the union. But often they placed a greater emphasis upon the company’s munificence.⁷ In fact, Jay Hormel became quite a progressive employer, able to anticipate union grievances and committed to his “master plan” of welfare capitalism. (This inclination developed only after and as a result of the 1933 strike, during which he behaved like any tyrannical employer, threatening to move the company from Austin, organizing a force of 200 strikebreakers in Minneapolis, and, possibly, appealing for intervention by federal troops.)⁸

However, the tone of caring and generosity began to disappear as soon as Jay Hormel died. After 1954, company management took an increasingly severe attitude toward its workers and, despite its continuing support for local charities through the Hormel Foundation, became less and less committed to the Hormel family hometown of Austin.

As early as 1946, when H. H. Corey succeeded Jay Hormel as president, the company began buying and building facilities in other states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, California, Washington, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, and Hawaii. Both the U.S. Army and the civilian population of Britain had made it through the war on the company’s most famous product, Spam. With peace at hand, Hormel looked to build upon this success and establish itself as an international force in the meatpacking and food industry.⁹

Geographic and industrial expansion continued during the following years, as did the ascension of corporate leaders from outside the Austin area. Among these was M. B. Thompson from South Dakota, who became company president in 1965 and later earned notoriety among generations of workers by reputedly remarking, “Before I’m through the workers will be living in tar-paper shacks.”¹⁰

The union that faced this change of attitude remained formidable, in spite of the years of peaceful coexistence. More than a machine for dues collection or an insurance agency, the local retained the ideology and culture of an organization that had fought before and would fight again if the need arose. Just as Jay Hormel’s liberality and Thompson’s greed entered local legend, so too did tales of P-9 founder Frank Ellis’ union leadership and of rank-and-file militancy dating from the 1933 strike.

In November of that year, neither Hormel nor the governor, Floyd B. Olsen, dared to declare full-scale war on the workers, though Olsen, himself a former IWW member, had mobilized 300 Minnesota National Guard troops. For one thing, the strikers were occupying the plant, where they had turned off the refrigeration system, endangering both $3,600,000 worth of meat and the $500,000 system itself, whose pipes would likely have frozen and burst within 24 hours of the shutoff.

Union zeal had swept Austin the previous summer. On one July evening, 600 Hormel workers signed union cards, responding to the company’s high-handed attempt to impose a 20-cent-a-week deductible insurance plan (even though some workers were making as little as 40 cents an hour), to the tyranny of plant foremen, and to Frank Ellis’ spadework. Ellis had started work in a packinghouse as a young man after his father’s death in a Swift plant. He became an IWW organizer as a result of his experiences as a meatcutter. During his teens and twenties, he became a “boomer,” riding the rails and working seasonal stints in packinghouses all over, agitating for the Wobblies all the while. He had been jailed from Texas to Minnesota, driven out of towns by gun thugs and sheriffs’ deputies, beaten by vigilantes, and accused of disloyalty because of his opposition to World War I.

Then Ellis came to Austin, where, because of skills honed during almost 30 years in midwestern packinghouses, Hormel made him a foreman in the casing room. Ellis used his new position to hire other union men and get them transferred to departments throughout the plant. When the urge for a union and the strike came along, he was ready.

Jay Hormel insisted that the strike was the work of outside agitators. Mistrusting the governor’s populist instincts, he attempted both to keep Olsen away from the scene and to pressure him to send in the militia against the strikers, among other things using major Minneapolis radio stations to create a sense of emergency. In the end, however, Olsen came to the town and personally worked out an agreement that provided for the rehiring of all strikers and ultimately for a two- to four-cent wage increase plus arbitration of all future disputes.

This victory was followed by several years of activism. Over the opposition of employer-backed anti-union groups such as the “Secret 500” and the “Citizens’ Alliance,” the Hormel packers organized city workers and all but four retail establishments in town into their Independent Union of All Workers, which, like its IWW predecessor, sought to represent every worker regardless of his or her craft. (Later the union became Local 183 of the CIO, and then Local 9 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, or UPWA.) They engaged in further sitdown strikes in the plant, including the 1936 sausage department sitdown that won union shop status for the plant.

Austin militants helped organize packinghouse workers in plants across Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota: IUAW branches were built in Albert Lea, Faribault, and South St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Mason City and Waterloo, Iowa. When the local newspaper, the Austin Daily Herald, proved to be a company organ, among other things attacking the union’s candidate in the city elections, Local 9 began its own weekly, The Unionist. In 1936 the Austin local, along with another independent union from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, pushed the fledgling CIO to make a place for packinghouse workers. And the local continued to be a force once the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee was begun, its power reflected in the fact that Frank Ellis became one of four national officers chosen to lead the new United Packinghouse Workers of America in 1943.¹¹

Such union experiences are seldom forgotten. Like many an organization, Local P-9 has a portrait of its founding father hanging in the entranceway of its headquarters; but unlike many successors, later generations of Austin union members know exactly who Frank Ellis was and what he and his contemporaries did. There remains, between a union that has known such experiences and one that has not, a tangible difference in the members’ understanding of the “black line” that exists between management and worker.

•   •   •

Nevertheless, Local P-9 faced a period of dramatic structural change in the meatpacking industry with leaders who were very much of the belief that the members must rely upon the goodwill and generosity of the Hormel company. Frank Shultz, president from the 1940s till 1969, was of the generation that understood union-company relations as a test of strength; his successors—notably Ernie Jones, Barney Thompson, and John Hansen—were more inclined toward accommodation. All were inclined toward isolationism. As Hormel’s Charles Nyberg told me in 1988:

Frank Shultz wouldn’t let the International representatives into town. The local helped out in other negotiations [elsewhere], but negotiations here were by P-9 and no one else. I remember the first time I saw the International here in town, Jessie Prosten came in to help negotiate and I heard people say, “This is a switch—P-9 never needed help before.”

Indeed, the first attempt to create a “chain,” or structure for pattern bargaining, occurred in 1973.¹²

The most influential of this accommodating breed of leaders was the P-9 business agent for 15 years, Richard Schaefer. It was Schaefer who really ran the union from 1969 to 1984—years that saw tremendous upheaval in the industry.

For, beginning in the 1960s, a number of aggressive companies, particularly Iowa Beef Processors (now IBP Inc.) employed much larger facilities located out in the countryside to challenge the hold of the “big four”—Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson—on the industry and the market. Iowa Beef drew upon a broadening pool of surplus rural labor and broke down traditionally skilled work into less skilled tasks. The company built massive, very modern, single-story slaughtering and processing facilities and took advantage of the new interstate highway system and refrigerated trucks, rather than depending upon outmoded rail transport. And Iowa Beef proved to be startlingly anti-labor, slashing wages below the old packers’ scales, then confronting strikes by transforming its plants into walled fortresses, complete with housing for strikebreakers so that they never had to leave the area and face angry picket lines. Like California grape growers in the 1960s, IBP found that it could use the Teamsters union against the meatpackers’ union, and it signed sweetheart deals with both the Teamsters and the National Maritime Union.

The old packers, which mostly operated vast, multi-product plants in large urban centers, felt the pressure of this competition. They closed old urban plants and began to look for ways to trim costs, particularly wages. Then Swift, Armour, Wilson, Morrell, Cudahy, and Hygrade were taken over by big conglomerates looking for short-term profits. In time, Armour’s first conglomerate owner, Greyhound, would sell out to another, ConAgra, which laid off all union workers and reopened its plants with nonunion labor. Wilson would file for Chapter 11 reorganization in order to abrogate its labor contracts. Today, the industry is increasingly fragmented: Rather than operating huge plants that slaughter and process hogs, cattle, and sheep, companies tend to specialize in particular kinds of meat and to either slaughter or process. By 1984 the average slaughterhouse had only 500 workers and paid very low wages; the average processing plant employed only 100 workers. And the level of unionization fell from 80 to 70 percent.¹³

Neither Hormel nor Local P-9’s leaders understood these coming changes well during the 1960s and 1970s. But Hormel, at least, understood that all meatpackers, regardless of the condition of their balance sheets, were going to drive wages downward, and it began demanding wage concessions as early as 1963, when higher production schedules began reducing workers’ incentive pay.

The concessionary package that paved the way for a later labor explosion came in 1978. Since 1975 the company had been considering building an ultra-modern pork-slaughtering and processing plant, rather than spending millions to improve the old plant, and was looking at sites outside Austin, including Waverly, Iowa, and Mankato, Minnesota. (The fact that this was to be a slaughtering and processing plant shows that Hormel had not yet bought the logic that these functions should take place in different facilities with unequally paid workers.) To make up for the building expense, Hormel executives said, the gang incentive system had to be eliminated and production increased. The union rejected this suggestion.

In early 1978 Hormel broke off negotiations over the incentive and production-increase issues and announced that it would definitely not be building the new plant in Austin. It had already closed the beef slaughter, eliminating over two hundred jobs, and issued 52-week layoff notices to three-hundred-odd more workers. Faced with this familiar form of corporate blackmail and urged to give in by Schaefer, local members got the company to change its mind by agreeing to a package that included both a “transition agreement” and a “new plant agreement,” the latter slated to go into effect once 750 people were working in the new plant. Thus the perpeptual “Working Agreement,” in place since 1940, was scrapped in favor of more conventional, fixed-term contracts.

These contracts temporarily froze wages, though, as in the Working Agreement, they provided for a pass-along of any change in wages negotiated with other companies as a “national pattern”; and they increased production schedules by another 20 percent. They allowed no strikes until three years after the “new plant agreement” took effect. As it worked out, this was a seven-year no-strike pledge.

And there would be no gang incentive in the new plant. Instead, once the new plant was on-line, old-plant workers would receive supplements to keep each one at an “average” of his or her former rate of pay. These supplements would come from an escrow account of around $20 million, made up of COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) payments that the workers would no longer receive. Until the new plant began operating, the escrow account functioned as a loan (which, workers say, averaged out at $12,000 per worker) to help the company build the new Austin plant. In exchange for these concessions, P-9 members received assurances from the company that wages in the new plant would be no lower than wages in the old one.¹⁴

However, the concessions did not usher in a period of stability in Austin. Adding to the confusion that resulted from working under three contracts, Local 9 was now a part of a new International union, the United Food and Commercial Workers. The UFCW had come into being in 1978 as a result of the merger of four unions, all troubled by the crisis in meatpacking and other basic industries. It was dominated by the leadership of the old Retail Clerks’ union.¹⁵ In 1980 the UFCW proposed that the Austin local, now known as P-9 to indicate its origins in the Packinghouse Workers union, agree to amalgamate with another Hormel union as a first step toward its incorporation into a large, amalgamated local. For a variety of reasons, including greater efficiency, the national union was promoting such reorganization across the country, but the resulting locals had a tendency to become distant from and unresponsive to rank-and-file workers. (The local representing the 900 workers at Hormel’s Ottumwa, Iowa, slaughtering plant, for example, was Local 431, which represented 5,000 workers from 100 companies across Iowa and in Illinois. The officers of the local would represent the packinghouse workers at “chain meetings,” Packinghouse Division conferences, and International conventions, even though most of them came out of another industry altogether, such as retailing.)

And in 1981, a year before the new plant was scheduled to open, the UFCW determined that there should be additional concessions from all Hormel locals, as well as from workers at the other old-line packers—Oscar Mayer, Armour, Swift, Morrell, and Wilson. The crisis in the industry was continuing, and national leaders insisted that existing contracts must be reopened, “to bring lower wage operators more in line with master agreement companies” and “minimize the wave of plant closings.” The UFCW pressed members to accept contract language stipulating that “the cost-of-living adjustment which is now in effect will be incorporated into the rates, and there will be no increase or reduction in rates for the balance of the present term of the Agreement and for the 1982–1985 term of the Agreement.” In exchange for this three-year wage freeze at $10.69 per hour and the reduction of COLA, Hormel agreed that there would be no plant closings in 1982 and that wage rates would be reopened for discussion in 1984.¹⁶

In each of these matters, the International had to win approval from the local membership. The proposal to merge Local P-9 with others was one of the first recommendations that Lewie Anderson made to the local, since at that time he had only recently been appointed Packinghouse Division director. It was not a good place to begin with such an independent-minded group. And it provided the occasion for the rise of another new leader, Jim Guyette.

•   •   •

“You have to understand that I really didn’t get along with him all that well,” recalled a retired P-9er who worked with Guyette in the loin cooler at the plant. “Nobody else wanted to think about how we were getting screwed by Hormel all the time. You just wanted to forget about it, to talk about something else. But not Guyette, he just wanted to talk about how the company was getting away with murder.

"In time we came to agree with him.”¹⁷

In Jim Guyette were combined a number of attributes: In his middle thirties, he was young enough to speak to the new workers; yet, having begun work at the company in 1968, he had sufficient experience to speak to the older ones. Like his counterpart Pete Winkels, who became business agent in late 1984, he came from a long line of Hormel workers—Guyette’s father and grandfather worked at the plant, while Winkels was a fourth-generation Hormel worker. A son of deaf-mute parents, Guyette demonstrated an unusual ability to articulate issues with precision, enforced by a steady gaze and calm manner, and to describe how and why things could and should be different. And he was a member of an increasingly unusual group: someone who had worked in both the old and the new plants, so that he was able to speak with authority about the changes that had come.

“I always wanted to be a farmer,” Guyette once told me while describing his increasing involvement in union affairs:

and I had no interest in becoming a bureaucrat or an institutional figure who’d be a union officeholder for 10 or 15 years. But I do enjoy getting those folks at times—you either control the situation or its controls you. It’s kind of fun to match wits with them, like when the time-study people came around in the plant, I’d stand up to them and say that I didn’t like people who made their living stealing from others.

Undoubtedly, Guyette’s stubborn insistence upon “doing what’s right” was also related to a sense of the injustice of his parents’ handicap and society’s treatment of them. But Guyette, who got along poorly with his father, was heavily influenced as well by his grandfather, a supervisor at the plant, who provided a positive feeling about unionism and a sense that a man cannot have dignity unless he stands up for justice.

At first, Guyette and the two or three others who agreed with him, mostly workers from the night shift, talked to other employees, denouncing what was becoming a regular practice of granting concessions to what they knew to be a very profitable company. They questioned the role that the International union was playing in urging workers to make such concessions. And they distributed leaflets, initially unsigned, among plant employees.

“We were concerned about the language that gave the company unlimited right to make time studies and the ‘dual gain’ wage structure—the practice of paying some workers the incentive and not others—which we saw as a two-tier system,” said Guyette. “And we didn’t like the escrow system—I felt that if the company needed money to build the plant they ought to go to a bank.”

The “phantom leaflets” infuriated Schaefer and the executive board. Questions such as “why are P-9 officers talking about a ‘chain concept’ when we really have no chain?” and “why are we giving money to the company?” caused other rank-and-filers to ask questions and led local officers to say that outsiders were infiltrating the local’s ranks. Finally, Guyette’s night-shift fraction having become a committee, they put out a signed leaflet encouraging members to attend the next union meeting and ask questions.

Initially, local president John Hansen ruled that the dissidents could not put forth motions from the floor of the meetings. This shocked the membership and led to further support for their side from the day shift, who argued that their rights as dues payers must be respected. But the dissidents remained strangers to many workers: Guyette and the other night-shift workers found it difficult to attend union meetings because these were held on weekday evenings. Finally, after the controversy had members buzzing, Guyette took vacation time to attend a packed membership meeting where he argued for a motion “either to make The Unionist [the union newspaper] more than something to line trash cans with or to drop it.” The meeting represented a “coming out” for the dissidents: At last, Guyette recalled one member saying, here is one of these night-shift radicals in the flesh.¹⁸

By the time Anderson came to Austin to promote the merger of P-9 and the other local, rank-and-filer Guyette was accustomed to speaking from the floor of union meetings. He spoke up again, opposing the merger, pointing out that the other local had different seniority rights from the Austin workers. Thus, he said, the merger would play into Hormel’s desire to divide the work force and facilitate its drive for concessions. As chair of the meeting, Anderson ruled him out of order. Guyette then appealed to the membership, who first overruled the chair, allowing him to speak, and then voted down Anderson’s merger proposal.

Thus the two men were pitted against each other from their first meeting. According to Guyette, Anderson chastised the local membership, telling them that they would live to regret the day they voted down the merger.

By year-end, the members had elected Guyette to the local’s executive board. From this position he attended “Hormel chain” meetings, where he continued to speak out against the International’s line that concessions—particularly as embodied in the 1981 wage-freeze and COLA-elimination proposals—were inevitable.

It is important to understand the UFCW structure through which communications between locals, the International, and the company took place. Unlike the old UPWA union practice of bringing as many as a hundred rank-and-file workers from all affected plants into meetings that hammered out negotiating strategy and master agreements, the UFCW allowed little participation by rank-and-filers, and its primary means of coordinating bargaining was through the participation of International officers. The decision to grant givebacks in 1981 was not the result of local discussions, but was announced to local leaders by way of a letter from UFCW president Wynn. The letter was read aloud by division director Lewie Anderson at a meeting of about thirty assembled officers from the company’s 12 operating locations. The grouping of regional and local officials known as the “Hormel chain,” had little formal standing: It never engaged in joint bargaining, never was able to negotiate a master agreement, had no by-laws or constitution, and, under the UFCW constitution, could not hold a chain-wide vote except under rare circumstances. But it was the UFCW’s chief mechanism for coordinating pattern bargaining.¹⁹

According to Guyette, the UFCW and its loyalists saw him as an unstable element and tried to intimidate and later to discredit him, first with harassing phone calls, then, “time and again,” by sending prostitutes to his room. (Ultimately, he says, the UFCW would offer him a position to shut him up, while both company Vice President David Larson and Schaefer would ask “what he really wanted” and urge him to “just let things happen.”)²⁰

Back home, with a majority of Austin’s executive board urging local members to accept the concessions, Guyette gave a report urging rejection. The rank and file voted with Guyette. Then Anderson came again to Austin and forced a second vote on the proposed package, characterizing it as a vote on whether or not the local “wanted to remain in the Hormel chain” or go off on its own. Thus couched as a vote for or against solidarity, the 1981 concessionary proposal was approved. Members also believed that they had traded a wage giveback for the right to strike in 1984.²¹

It was neither the first nor the last instance of the International’s using heavy-handed methods and appeals to unity to get members to vote its way. But it was the last time such methods would work in Austin—at least until the trusteeship was imposed in 1986. The 1981 vote may have led the UFCW to overestimate the utility of such tactics, for they would require serial votes and re-votes in the years to come. What they should have paid attention to, instead, was the growing unhappiness of the Austin work force.

The new $100-million plant opened in August 1982, and by the following year it was already clear that it was a disaster so far as the workers were concerned. To begin with, promises of security proved hollow. Most of the 3,000 old-plant workers were laid off (the first layoffs since the 1930s), retired, transferred to other plants, or otherwise gotten rid of before the new plant began operations. “The company wanted to get the older workers out of there and break with tradition,” according to Guyette. “They didn’t want a situation where, if the foreman treated people unfairly, these old veterans would come up and say, ‘Look, Jack, this ain’t the way it works here.’”²²

The 20 percent higher production standards and elaborate automation enabled workers to churn out 440 cans of Spam a minute and 1,600 boned hams an hour with a much-reduced work force. Meat Industry magazine rhapsodized about the facility:

The overall square footage . . . of 1,089,000 square feet is roughly the equivalent of 23 football fields. . . . Production volumes are beyond anything else in the industry. Over two million hogs are slaughtered and cut per year, resulting in over 200 million pounds worth of over 400 products produced annually. . . . Each of the manufacturing divisions within the plant—hog kill and cut (including rendering), cured meats, canned meats, dry sausage, and prepared sausage—and the two huge warehouse systems are, in essence, plants unto themselves, housed, as one supervisor put it, in “a great big shell.” . . . terminals feeding into the [IBM 8100 System 3] mainframe’s memory give inventory managers access to the disposition of virtually every pound of meat inside the plant. . . . each of these warehouses features automatic stretch-wrapping of pallet-loads, automatic pallet size-checking, automatic slip-sheeting, and . . . automatic palletizing. . . . Throughout the plant are several pieces of equipment exhibiting new or state-of-the-art technologies for meat processing, including Protecon automatic ham deboners, Morrison Weighing Systems, automatic primal sorters, Langen and Challenge-Cook equipment for massaging and tumbling hams . . . and a Conco-Tellus forklift “robot” for shuttling unformed boxes from place to place.²³

As a result of such technologies and the speedup, the 3,000 jobs at the old plant (there had been 4,000 in Blum’s day) would become 1,500 jobs in the new plant. Approximately 1,100 of these workers were new hires.²⁴

Moreover, in abolishing the incentive system, the 1978 agreement had eliminated a key ingredient of what Blum saw as a formula for labor harmony.²⁵ Even though the seniority system, the 52-week layoff notice, and the guaranteed annual wage remained, without the incentive system workers no longer controlled the pace of work. In the new plant, as in pre-union days, foremen determined the speed of the line. Production standards were no longer subject to negotiation, so the company’s industrial engineers, who were more and more in evidence, cranked them up even beyond the agreed-upon 20 percent hike. And the foremen were clearly back in control, to the point of now demanding that workers raise their hands to go to the bathroom and harassing those who were out sick or injured with three to five phone calls a day.²⁶

By their own admission, the new hires, some of whom later became the most diligent of strikers, were chosen by the company for their rural, nonunion backgrounds. But in time they were transformed—by the company’s scornful attitude toward them, on-the-job injuries, wage and benefit cuts, and the message brought to them by those who had seen work in both the old and new plants and were able to describe the world they had lost.

Under such strains, factionalism was growing in the union local. Schaefer had his followers; there was the small group of radicals around Guyette; and an uncommitted middle was represented by Floyd Lenoch, who served as local president from 1981 to 1984. A devout Christian, Lenoch wanted strongly to get along with both the company, which he felt was honorable, and the International, in which he had faith.

As the union election at the end of 1983 loomed, Lenoch announced that he would run for executive board, but not for re-election as president. Increasingly, there were two distinct forces competing for union leadership—the dissidents and the old machine—and the center was not holding. Thus standing for election were Guyette, who had lost his executive board re-election bid in 1982 and a run for vice president in 1983, and Vice President John Anker, an ally of Schaefer’s who argued that P-9 members’ best hope lay in going along with the company.

Guyette won the election, 351 to 312. Since Schaefer remained local business agent, local leadership was seriously divided in its approach to matters of principle and practicality.

Immediately, the International tested Guyette’s dedication to his principles. That spring, local officers met in Chicago, where they adopted a number of resolutions against concessions. They stated that in order to stand united, the union must secure and maintain common expiration dates in the various Hormel contracts. And they reiterated their support for the guiding principles adopted previously by the International: that there should be no mid-term contract concessions, no concessions whatsoever to profitable companies, and concessions to others only as a last resort and after bitter struggle. Nineteen eighty-five was declared a pivotal year in halting concessions, and, accordingly, locals agreed to stay in regular communication with each other and to back each other up if need be by refusing to cross each others’ picket lines.

But no sooner was the meeting concluded than division director Anderson approved a meeting between Hormel and the Ottumwa local to discuss mid-term concessions without the participation of other locals.

Guyette wrote letters of protest to UFCW president Wynn, noting in one:

To say that our membership is upset with the actions of Local 431 would be an understatement, and I on behalf of our 1600 members at Hormel in Austin would ask you to intercede and stop such meetings which will not only violate Article 23 in any concessions which are made, but will destroy our chain and its entire concept which would not be in the best interests of the union movement. We have enough problems with employers today trying to destroy the union without each local striking out on their own and destroying ourselves.

The president of the Algona, Iowa, Hormel local joined him in protest.

It seems likely that Guyette enjoyed putting such a statement together, given Anderson’s 1981 invocation of chain discipline to win further concessions from Austin. But Local P-9’s objections were brushed aside by Wynn, and the International approved the Ottumwa mid-term concessions, though this put the local’s expiration date out of sync with the rest of the chain and contradicted the Meatpacking Division’s express policy positions.²⁷

That June, Anderson wrote to all locals asking them to advise him whether they wished to remain in the “Hormel chain” and to enter as a group into wage reopener discussions with the company that fall. P-9 responded that it wished to do so, and its officers met with those of other chain locals in July. There, the division director again advanced the argument that it was futile to fight concessions. “I asked Anderson, once again, to tell us what his program was for fighting back,” Guyette recalled.

Anderson responded to me by stating that if I genuinely believed in fighting concessions, then I should “guarantee” that Local P-9 would go out on strike in September, “legal or illegal.” He further stated, much to my surprise, that the Hormel company was going to take the position that a strike by P-9 in September would be illegal, despite the language in the 1982 agreement which Anderson had insisted we approve, providing for a wage re-opener and right to strike in September of 1984.1 replied that, as Anderson well knew, I could hardly “guarantee” that P-9 would strike in September, when no strike vote had as yet been even proposed, let alone passed upon by the requisite two-thirds majority mandated by the UFCW Constitution. Second, I told Anderson that if, in fact, his claim that such a strike might be illegal was true, it was even more preposterous to expect me to “guarantee” on the spot that the membership of my local would vote to strike.²⁸

Guyette’s account of this exchange accords with his by-the-book personal style and insistence upon observing democratic process, and with Anderson’s style of making decisions first and asking procedural questions later. It should be added, however, that the International offered a much different interpretation of these events in literature distributed in 1986 with the intention of discrediting P-9’s leadership. According to that version:

All the locals except Local P-9 agreed in July to strike Hormel in September if the chain could not reach an agreement. Local P-9’s president, Jim Guyette, expressed concern about the local’s legal right to strike in light of the no-strike clause in their contract and questioned whether the local’s members would support a strike by other Hormel workers. . . . the Austin facility represented 40 percent of Hormel’s production, and hence was crucial to any successful strike by the chain. . . . In September 1984, Local P-9 broke ranks with the chain during negotiations, stating that it would negotiate separately with Hormel.²⁹

This version suggests that P-9’s leaders should have agreed to an illegal strike (which could quickly have been broken by a court injunction). It fails to discuss the confusing multi-contract situation in effect in Austin and the general lack of clarity about just how the 1981 wage reopener modified the “new plant agreement.” Wage reductions seemed to have been ruled out by that 1981 agreement—P-9 members were told it provided for “no increase or reduction” in rates through 1985. But in addition to denying that the reopener had given P-9 the right to strike in 1984, Hormel was claiming that the “transition agreement’s” language dealing with national pattern changes allowed reduction of Austin wages down to what had become the new prevailing rate.

To clarify matters and find out what their real rights were, P-9 agreed with the company to submit to arbitration the issue of its right both to strike and to have unreduced wages. According to Guyette, Anderson seized upon this decision to exile P-9 from chain meetings (with the exception of Schaefer, who was “chain chairman”) after September 1984. P-9’s opposition to the International’s retrenchment program had begun to win adherents in the other locals, who were turning down all concessionary proposals. Subsequently, Anderson asked P-9 to “step aside” from the negotiating process, since Hormel had stated that it would only deal with P-9’s wages through arbitration. P-9 did so, Guyette said, with the understanding that the local was not deserting the chain.

Two months later, in November 1984, UFCW representatives appeared at the Austin facility, passing out a letter ostensibly from the other chain locals that denounced P-9 for withdrawing from the chain. Guyette sent off letters of protest to the UFCW regional director and to Wynn’s assistant. These were ignored. Then arbitrator George Fleischli ruled that the company did indeed have the right to reduce Austin workers’ wages.³⁰

Though “no reduction in rates” language had resulted in an arbitrator’s reversal of wage cuts at the Oscar Mayer company, there was in fact no such language in the 1982 Hormel contract, though the Summary of Agreement distributed by Anderson indicated that identical language existed in the Oscar Mayer and Hormel agreements. This “missing language” was to become the subject of heated exchanges between the local and Anderson. For a majority of P-9ers, it became the final, conclusive evidence of Anderson’s treason.³¹

With the 23 percent wage and benefit cuts now put into effect, all of P-9’s chickens had come home to roost: Company management had become so vindictive that it was now using language similar to that which guaranteed labor peace in the 1940s to cudgel its 1980s work force. Hormel was no longer interested in being a pathbreaker in industrial relations; rather, it had become a follower, combining a milder version of the IBP model with more automated work-place methods to win record profits. And the new ruthlessness in the industry had left P-9 part of a large, autocratic bureaucracy that defined unity as a by-product of obedience to national union authority.

None of this was acceptable to Guyette and his slim majority of backers. ‘The future is what happened today that you weren’t expecting yesterday,” Winkels wrote, explaining why his generation felt that it had to make history whether it wanted to or not. “When you corner an animal—even a timid animal—and you poke and prod and kick that animal long enough, the animal figures it’ll have no alternative but to come after you and bite you,” added Guyette.³² P-9 had been poked enough—but it remained unclear how and when it would bite back. Then Guyette read about Ray Rogers’ Corporate Campaign and its various successes in Business Week magazine. Within two months, Rogers had come to Austin to present a plan for fighting Hormel. Suddenly, the “cornered” union local had a sense of direction.