X

CONCLUSION

Labor leaders are more than sweethearts, they’re concubines.

—Studs Terkel¹

The Hormel strike left its critics and sympathizers with two fundamental questions: Could the strikers have emerged with some kind of victory if they had chosen different tactics? And did the experience offer any direction for American labor?

On the question of tactics, there is now widespread feeling among the former strikers that they should have employed violence to keep the Austin plant closed. Somewhat paradoxically, many also say that the mass displays of nonviolent civil disobedience were helpful to the cause. Most still believe that the odds against them were not so great that victory was impossible. No one I talked to says they should have thrown in the towel and conceded defeat at some point just to save their jobs.

“The strike doesn’t gain when you look at a scab and say, ‘Have a nice day’” reflected Darrell Busker. “We should have broken the scabs’ kneecaps the first time they tried to cross the line,” said Vicky Guyette—to which a nodding Barbara Collette added, “Of course I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to do it . . .” But there’s the rub: For people who made their living as killers of animals, few in Austin had the killer instinct where people were concerned.

“I believed in civil disobedience,” said Rod Huinker. “We should have kept it up, we should be doing it now. People have to do it when things aren’t right, when they take your rights away—it makes you visible.”

“A serious mistake we made was ending the demonstrations at the bank,” Skinny Weis told me. “We totally backed off when we should have gone back and gotten arrested in mass. That would have brought things to a head: The bank and the Hormel Foundation were the two power structures that controlled Hormel.”²

Several P-9ers emphasized the importance of the 450 union crossovers to the company. “The only way to have gotten anywhere was if nobody had gone back,” reflected Pete Winkels.

Then it would have seemed that Hormel indeed meant to break the union. Instead, they were able to say, “Look, even their own people are coming back.” They played on that, saying that they had one-half old scabs and half new scabs. But had no one gone back, they’d have had no choice but to bargain. A completely new work force wouldn’t have been tolerated in Minnesota. They knew that, so they waited until they had enough people ready and willing to go back in before they reopened the plant.

“I really believe that if not one person had crossed, we could have won,” agreed Huinker. “If no one had crossed, they would have made more compromises.”³

For Ray Rogers, the key obstacle to winning was the active opposition of the UFCW.

The plan was to neutralize the bank, shut the company down, and, with the Adopt-A-Family money, make sure that the members didn’t get starved out. Then to turn to massive civil disobedience.

But I never counted on the International fighting so hard against us. I would never have believed that they would attack us, ignore us when the National Guard came, that Kirkland and Winpisinger would get involved against us, and that they’d spend the millions that they did to defeat us. I never figured they’d do anything one way or the other.⁴

Some critics say that Rogers should have known that the International officers would intervene to protect their turf—these were “their members,” the UFCW often asserted proprietorially—and what they saw as national bargaining goals. But, more importantly, critics also fault Corporate Campaign and the members for continuing to strike at all during such anti-union times.

Several journalists, including Peter Perl of the Washington Post and David Moberg, have suggested that when the National Guard was sent in, P-9 should have gone back to work without a contract and employed so-called in-plant tactics to bring Hormel to reason. These “in-plant” tactics, popularized in the United States by Jerry Tucker of the UAW’s New Directions caucus, consist of organizing members to slow down, to “work-to-rule,” to file mass grievances, and generally to make it difficult for management to realize its production goals. In Brazil, auto workers have referred to similar tactics as “building the car upside-down.”⁵

But there are as many problems and uncertainties attached to this approach as to the one employed by P-9. As Tucker himself has reminded union audiences, companies will invariably begin firing union leaders in response to inplant slowdowns or sabotage of production goals. Employees working without a contract have no remedy for such firings, and those who remain on the job have no recourse but further escalation. In general, Tucker makes extremely modest claims for these tactics.⁶

William Serrin suggests that rather than adopting such a “wimpy” in-plant approach, P-9ers should have seized the Austin facility.⁷

P-9 members, though, say that they considered all these options and bet instead on escalating the strike with extended picketing. “A plant sitdown was rejected in favor of the roving pickets, in part because we heard that the company had armed guards in the plant,” Guyette told a conference sponsored by the publication Labor Notes in November 1986. “But we also knew that we had to deal with [production at] the other plants.”⁸

“I still don’t think anything good would have come out of going back, though as it turned out, not much good came out of staying out,” reflected Lynn Huston. “The executive board members might have stayed in power, and there probably would have been no trusteeship. But if we had gone back, they’d have fired all the [rank-and-file] leaders immediately. They’d have gotten the same result: Only the goddam sheep would have been left.”⁹

From my point of view, P-9 bet on the best option—the fact that it failed does not mean that another option would have succeeded. The gamble that P-9ers chose had a chance not only to win their strike goals but also to point the way forward for labor. Substitution of violent plant gate confrontations, an attempted seizure of the Austin plant, or, particularly, use of in-plant tactics would have afforded less of a chance for either, for the reasons described by Guyette and Huston.

I agree with many others that the key period was in January and February 1986: The use of the National Guard against the strikers, followed by big labor’s repeated denunciations of the strike, created powerful public sentiment in P-9’s favor. But in addition to shutting Ottumwa, P-9 had to shut down the Fremont plant. Even with the 1985 acquisitions that increased Hormel’s slaughtering capacity by more than two-thirds, Fremont’s slaughter and production remained crucial.

A shutdown there “would have affected us severely,” Nyberg said to me later. “We were able to subcontract a large amount of the company’s production—in fact everything from Austin—and we could have subcontracted from that plant too, but it would have taken some scrambling.”¹⁰

Had P-9 shut Fremont and kept more of its own members from weakening—the two ifs are probably inextricably joined—Hormel would have needed to find a way out. Public sentiment would have been running deeply against the company, and Hormel would have been hard pressed to replace all the Austin, Ottumwa, and Fremont workers. Had P-9 shut down FDL, Hormel would have been in serious trouble indeed.

With Fremont and the two FDL plants operating, and the intervention of the state of Minnesota on Hormel’s side, the strikers had little chance to realize their goals. What’s more, as Jan Pierce understood, Hormel likely had broad behind-the-scenes support, as it was “carrying the ball for Corporate America.”¹¹

Should P-9 have moved earlier to shut down Fremont and Ottumwa? Perhaps. But one cannot be sure that union members in these other locations would have taken P-9’s extended pickets seriously before the reopening of the plant and the arrival of the National Guard in Austin.

I do not agree with Rogers about the role of the UFCW. As this account has shown, the national union mounted a concerted effort to undermine the strike from its beginning, and that hurt the strike effort. But it helped as well: Without International opposition, the Austin strikers would not have attracted anything like the support that they won.

During 1985-86, P-9 received thousands of letters of support. Some of these said little more than “Hang in there.” Many union officers and individuals said that they had walked on picket lines and knew all the associated anxieties well. A lot of people admitted they didn’t have much money—they were laid off, on fixed incomes, widows, children, and strikers themselves—but they wanted to send ten dollars, twenty dollars, something. Almost everyone said that no Hormel products would be allowed in their households. And a lot of people suggested that the opposition of the UFCW had further convinced them of the Tightness of P-9’s cause.

“I have never been much of a union person and have believed (and still do) that many union officials bleed their workers dry financially,” wrote one San Diego woman. “However, I feel you are being wronged by Hormel.”

A laid-off Pennsylvania steelworker wrote: “Our U.S.W.A. International has sold its members out the same way your international union has. My prayers and support are with you. . . . Your unity and stand at the local level is unionism at its best!! Go for it at all cost.”

And an unemployed West Virginia worker, who said he was praying for P-9ers, wrote, “The Guard, the politicians, and the labor leaders seem to pray to another God these days. . . . You are doing a fine job and I do not want to see your efforts go for nothing. In all of these [sic] we are maybe rediscovering the solidarity we should never have let slip.”

These were union people who felt that they had been let down by labor’s leaders and people who had never been in a union, but who were moved by the UFCW’s perfidy to side with the strike. “I am very distressed at the lack of support that you’ve received from the UFCW International,” wrote a Pittsburgh physical therapist. “Your determination and courage in the face of Hormel interests and the bought-off bosses of the union . . . is an inspiration to all workers,” a Washington, D.C., woman said.¹²

Had the UFCW backed the strike and called upon its institutional allies for assistance, it could have placed serious pressure on First Bank. The UFCW and other AFL-CIO affiliates might have mounted the serious threat—perhaps the threat of withdrawing millions of dollars from pension fund accounts—necessary to move the bank and thus the Hormel company. In practice, though, the UFCW has not been disposed to use this sort of weapon against corporate adversaries. A highly publicized joint effort with the Service Employees’ union against Beverly Enterprises, for example, employed public attacks on the quality of patient care in that corporation’s nursing homes, not pressure upon creditors or stockholders.¹³

Moreover, had the UFCW backed the strikers, there is a strong likelihood that things would have turned out just as badly if not worse. To consider what the Hormel strike might have been like with the active support and direction of the UFCW, one only needs to take a look at the 1987–88 strike at John Morrell & Co.

In March 1987, 750 workers at the company’s plant in Sioux City, Iowa, rejected a cut of their $9.25-per-hour wage by $1.25, which they felt came too quickly upon the heels of an earlier round of concessions at Morrell plants across the Midwest. Beginning in May, their strike was supported by the company’s 2,500 workers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who honored an extended picket line thrown up by the Iowans.

The sympathy strike echoed not only the activities at Hormel, but also a 1986 Sioux Falls sympathy strike in honor of strikers from Morrell’s third major plant in Arkansas City, Kansas. Because of company whipsawing, by 1987 workers at the three plants earned different rates of pay ($7.25 in Kansas) and had contracts that expired at different times.

The governor sent state troopers to escort strikebreakers into the South Dakota plant on May 5. Mass picketing followed at that plant gate, supported by hundreds of members of other unions. Soon the company had a court injunction limiting the number of plant gate pickets to 25, with huge fines awaiting any violators.

A rally on May 11 drew 3,000 people to Sioux Falls, including a van of former P-9 strikers. The following week, members and supporters distributed thousands of leaflets that explained their issues across the community. The International also began a campaign to publicize the high injury rate at the company, which it said had risen 76 percent since 1981: It got the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to levy fines of $690,000 for the company’s underreporting of injuries and won attention from ABC’s “20-20” and the New York Times.

Was somebody copying P-9? Much of this activity certainly resembled that of the Austin strikers. One key aspect, though, was different: Morrell is a subsidiary of the United Brands conglomerate, and the UFCW failed to mount even a publicity effort against other parts of that entity or to attack its weaknesses.

Six months after the sympathy strike began, on November 7, the UFCW called off the Sioux Falls action. Around two thousand replacement workers were in the plant there, and the company said that it would not lay them off to call back the strikers. Sioux Falls workers expressed confusion about just what the UFCW had in mind: “It’s not settled . . . we’re not guaranteed our jobs back . . . we don’t know what the company’s going to tell us,” said striker Mark Reichelt.

Lewie Anderson said that ending the strike was a tactic to increase the pressure on Morrell. The original Iowa strike, he alleged, had been an “unfair labor practice” strike, and thus Morrell would be required by law to take back all strikers, give them back pay, and keep the strikebreakers as well. Already, he said, the strike had cost Morrell $40 million.

After a management shakeup, negotiators from the company and union met in November, but by December talks had broken off without progress. Then, in March 1988, the NLRB ruled that the Iowans had not been unfair-labor-practice strikers; thus no workers were entitled to reinstatement. That same month, a federal jury sided with Morrell in a $40 million suit against the UFCW and found that the sympathy strike had violated the no-strike clause of the union contract: That jury eventually awarded Morrell $24.6 million. As of April 1989, the company had recalled only around 750 of the South Dakotans; hundreds of the Iowans, who made an unconditional return-to-work offer in February 1988, also remained out of work.¹⁴

Notable in all this history is the fact that the workers were willing to risk their jobs and, taking the moral high road, stand up for each other. But rather than building upon their efforts, the UFCW cut the strike off after six months in order to rely instead on power games involving the federal bureaucracy. On top of the costs of the strike, the OSHA fines and bad publicity may have encouraged a Morrell management shakeup—but they failed to usher in a team that would compromise with the union. And the NLRB seems not to have made the least concession to Anderson’s “unfair-labor-practice” flight of fancy.

Morrell workers would probably have done better to extend their strike efforts to all Morrell facilities and initiate a campaign aimed at making United Brands an untouchable in the financial community and its high-profile products—such as Chiquita Bananas, Broadcast canned meats, and Vernors ginger ale—untouchables on the supermarket shelves. But the UFCW seems unwilling to carry a struggle in that direction, perhaps because they fear that they might do permanent damage to a company.

The catalogue of similar union miscues is extensive. Only a few weeks after it signed the September 1986 agreement that covered all of Hormel’s plants other than Ottumwa and Knoxville, the UFCW led FDL locals in Dubuque, Iowa, and Rochelle, Illinois, out on strike—ostensibly to win the same package.

Thus the union passed up a rare opportunity to shut down all of the Hormel-FDL operation and thereby win a common rate. As noted earlier, Hormel could not have made it through P-9’s strike without FDL: It had arranged to take over the low-wage packer, which had a slaughtering operation with two-thirds the capacity of Hormel’s, only a few weeks before the Austin local went out. Moreover, during P-9’s strike the UFCW said that the FDL workers had no choice but to perform P-9ers’ struck work. Now the Hormel locals, including trusteed P-9 with its “scab” membership, had no choice but to return the favor.

Within two months, the FDL strike was defeated. Workers went back for $8.50 an hour, to be increased to just over $9.00 during the next three years. Sixty strikers were not called back, having been permanently replaced.¹⁵

In 1987 Patrick Cudahy Inc. demanded cuts from its $9.20 hourly rate to a rate as low as $6.50, after getting almost $4.00 in givebacks in the previous two contracts. One of the “big four” packers as recently as the 1960s, Cudahy had been reduced by the 1980s to operating only one Wisconsin plant. But its 900 workers there doubted that further cuts would make much difference to the company, and they went out on strike in January of that year.

Major demonstrations followed, featuring Jesse Jackson and hundreds of labor supporters from Milwaukee and across the Midwest. Coached by Thomas Krukowski, the attorney who had worked for Hormel, Cudahy hired 700 scabs, most of them black, to replace the predominantly white strike force. In April the NLRB found that since the company had committed unfair labor practices—namely, failure to bargain in good faith—the strike represented a lockout. Nonetheless, strikers were denied unemployment benefits. And the strike continued for a year, during which the company appealed the NLRB’s decision. Finally, Cudahy filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy laws.¹⁶

By late 1987 Hormel was ready for further wage relief. The company announced in November that it was going to close its Austin kill and cut, as it was still unable to compete with packers such as IBP, which paid hourly wages of $6.00 to $8.00. With the Ottumwa plant closed, the newly elected scab officers of renamed Local 9 surmised that the company really needed the slaughter and that the announcement was simply a ploy intended to win further concessions.¹⁷

They therefore refused to negotiate a further wage cut. So, in March 1988, the company announced that it would subcontract the plant’s slaughter to a newly formed Texas firm, Quality Pork Processors, which would pay around $7.00 an hour. QPP opened in June with a work force of 250 people, including about 60 former P-9ers, hired from an applicant pool of over 800. But three days later, QPP was shut down as a result of an arbitrator’s ruling that Hormel could not subcontract operations covered under Local 9’s contract. Soon the company announced again that it might be forced to sell the slaughter, and QPP prepared to go out of business.¹⁸

In September 1988 Hormel announced that it would end hog slaughtering in Fremont by August 1989 and would lay off 324 out of 770 workers there. The closure would remove Hormel from the slaughtering business altogether. Three months later QPP was back in business in Austin, as Local 9 announced that it was close to winning a union contract there. In January the tentative contract’s terms were revealed: It would pay workers $6.50 to $7.00 an hour. The announcement set off howls of protest from other UFCW locals, whose members saw their wages threatened.¹⁹

All such whipsawing and renegotiating of contracts derives from a single cause: the UFCW’s failure to organize the low-wage mega-packers IBP and ConAgra. These two and the low-wage but partly organized Excel Corp. buy, slaughter, and sell nearly three-quarters of the country’s grain-fattened cattle, and more and more they are taking over pork slaughtering as well. From time to time the UFCW has announced that it was about to plunge into an all-out effort to organize one or the other of these, but not much has happened so far.²⁰

The case of IBP is ironic. As the journalist Jonathan Kwitney has shown, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, predecessor to the UFCW, had that company over a barrel back in 1970. In the late 1960s, IBP, which was already the largest meat company in the world, was pioneering the approach of butchering beef at the point of slaughter using low-wage workers, rather than sending whole carcasses to the point of consumption to be cut up by high-wage supermarket butchers. But the company was having no success penetrating the country’s biggest meat market, New York City: Supermarkets there refused to handle IBP’s boxed beef because of the understandable opposition of their unionized butchers.

In 1969 the Amalgamated struck the company’s Dakota City plant, in the first of several violent strikes. Several homes were dynamited, and there was at least one murder. By April of the following year, IBP was running $9 million in the red, and Chemical Bank, the lead bank in the company’s $30 million loan line, was threatening to call in its chips. Had it done so, IBP would have “gone broke,” according to its chief executive, Currier Holman.

With things at this pass, the Amalgamated might have demanded recognition of the union at all IBP facilities and wages for meatpacking plant workers that would not undercut those of supermarket butchers. Instead, according to Kwitney, the union’s leverage was used to win payoffs for mobsters and mob-connected union officials such as Irving Stern, still a UFCW vice president. A year after the payoffs were made, IBP was shipping 60 carloads of boxed beef a week into New York.²¹

By the 1980s IBP had become a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum and was even more powerful. Employees at the Dakota City plant had never won a union contract without a strike. Around eight thousand workers at 10 other plants remained unorganized, partly the result of the high employee turnover intentionally generated by the company. In mid-December 1986 the Dakota City workers were out again—locked out this time, shortly after they rejected a four-year freeze of their $8.00-an-hour wages and a $6.00 rate for new hires.

Two months earlier the UFCW had announced that it was beginning a nationwide drive to organize IBP and expected to hold elections at four or five plants by late spring or early summer. In-plant organizing, conducted by a small army of worker-organizers, would be accompanied by campaigns to build community support for the union. As at Morrell, the UFCW began to pressure OSHA over IBP’s health and safety record, in time leading the agency to fine the company $2.59 million for its failure to report 1,038 injuries and another $3.1 million for willfully injuring workers. IBP’s callousness became such an issue that Bruce Babbitt repeatedly denounced the company during his brief presidential bid.

After seven months the Dakota City workers went back, accepting a three-year wage freeze, topped by a 15-cent increase in the fourth year, and a $6.00 rate for new hires. IBP did agree to take all the strikers back, however, while keeping an equal number of replacements, whom it had hired after reopening the plant in March.

The organizing drive proved largely unsuccessful. By early 1988 the union had begun quietly closing organizing offices and pulling organizers from the nonunion plants. Still, the drive was not a total loss: In June the UFCW announced that IBP had agreed to voluntary recognition of the union at its 1,700-worker Joslin, Illinois, plant. The single organizing victory very likely represented a tradeoff; in exchange, the UFCW probably supported the settlement that reduced the huge OSHA fines to $975,000 in late 1988. The Chicago Tribune speculated that any union contract at Joslin would probably be patterned on what it called the “radically concessionary” Dakota City pact.

Meanwhile, the company has announced plans to build a new $40 million plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where it will employ 1,200 workers and slaughter 14,000 hogs a day. Workers there will make $6.00 an hour.²²

•   •   •

What about strategic direction—did P-9 offer any lesson pointing the way ahead for labor? To discover the answer, we must first look at a frequently heard UFCW criticism of the strike.

“Local P-9 gave Hormel the opportunity to gut the whole agreement,” Anderson told me. “The local rewrote the whole contract. Experienced negotiators know you should never do that—they had a big enough struggle just winning the $10.69.” This was another reflection of P-9’s pursuit of “total victory or total defeat.”²³

Anderson’s remarks ignore the fact that it was Hormel, not the local, that sought to radically redesign the contract in 1985, just as it had in 1978. But Anderson’s comments also reflect the common wisdom of American labor organizations and leaders. Set a few small goals; look for long-term, gradual, and incremental gains; postpone the big struggle till the times are more favorable.

There are several problems with this approach. If, as one celebrated recent study has argued, the United States has entered a new period of industrial relations history, such a method is increasingly unlikely to win even small goals. Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Robert McKersie’s The Transformation of American Industrial Relations describes a world in which power has shifted away from corporate industrial relations professionals—who, in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to maintain smooth, established relationships with unions—and toward human resource planners, who operate from an individualistic, nonunion framework. The “fundamental, structural change” involved means that times are unlikely to become more favorable to labor on their own, nor are American labor relations likely to revert to a New Deal system of stable and routine collective bargaining, even should there be favorable alterations in labor laws.²⁴

More importantly, the piecemeal, go-slow approach will not work as the basis for a movement. If labor is to have any future, there is one question that must be faced: How to “put the movement back in the labor movement.” Considered as something more than a slogan, the phrase raises a number of problems—articulated most profoundly in sociologist Robert Michels’ classic study of mass organizations, Political Parties.

In his now familiar, dour phrases, Michels articulated the lowered political expectations of 20th-century humankind. There are “immanent oligarchical tendencies”—the antithesis of democratic movement sensibilities—existing “in every kind of human organization,” he said, including organizations whose alleged aim is the overthrow of oligarchy. Michels believed that these tendencies resulted from the necessary extension of the growing and maturing organization’s administrative apparatus. Along with this bureaucracy grows the increasing necessity for obedience to hierarchical rules. A “fighting organization” must have centralization to be effective. More and more, the “incompetent” rank and file assume a posture of passivity and gratitude for the efforts of their leaders. More and more, reference to ethical principles becomes “a necessary fiction.”²⁵

Does this suggest that, as a mature organizational form, U.S. labor organizations are incapable of again constituting a movement? What the Hormel strike emphasized was that, contrary to Michels, the ethical principles of labor are not yet a “fiction” to the rank and file. Jim Guyette and his followers built a nationwide following by admonishing the company to “do what is right” and live up to its promises. "How can you call yourselves union men?” they asked the International representatives suspected of collusion with the bosses. As much as for $10.69, P-9ers fought for “dignity”; their Ottumwa supporters proudly carried a banner that read “We honor picket lines.”

Equally important to that following was the supportive, democratic union community that P-9 members constructed—and the fact that they showed this to be a more effective “fighting organization” than the centralized national bureaucracy.

Both Nyberg and Anderson now agree that the company and the International underestimated P-9. “The way we responded to the strike indicates we didn’t believe the duration would be what it turned out to be,” Nyberg told me. Anderson claims to have understood that the Austin workers, who had a strong sense of having been treated unjustly, were prepared for a long struggle. But, he noted, others in the UFCW “did not understand that—with the best of intentions, it went down from Wynn to Foreman to Olwell to Hansen.”²⁶

During a July 1986 University of Minnesota labor relations meeting, where he made a joint presentation with Hormel vice president Dave Larson, Joe Hansen further illustrated the UFCW officers’ patronizing underestimation of the members. Calling himself “one of the all-time great compromisers,” Hansen ridiculed the local union’s negotiations efforts and said that the UFCW allowed the strike in order to let the local “get it out of their system.”²⁷

Both the UFCW and Hormel underrated P-9 because neither could come to grips with the strength of the local’s ethical position and communitarian practices, or with the attraction that those held for the country’s rank-and-file labor community. “Wynn’s problem was that he is an amoral man/’ reflected William Serrin. “He has no moral standing—almost no labor leaders do today. Guyette, though, was the man who couldn’t be bought off, and they regarded him as a strange duck.”²⁸

The local members’ refusal to be bought off or intimidated was not strange to the broader public, though. A Virginia man wrote, “I may well not know the whole story, but from everything I do know it seems pretty obvious that you are right. Do what is right.” A UFCW member from Illinois sent the local a copy of a letter he wrote to Lane Kirkland. “Labor did not become strong by pandering to the prevailing attitude of the day,” he said. “Labor grew and rose up because labor was right.”²⁹

Are labor’s national structures past being able to resurrect an ethical standard to which unorganized American workers will respond? Have they simply grown too complex and oligarchical? Less developed organizations might have embraced the Austin workers’ struggle, then harnessed their energy and ability to energize others in order, ultimately, to organize the nonunion packers, much as the youthful CIO did with the energy and talent of P-9’s predecessor union, the Independent Union of All Workers.

Historically, American labor has only been able to reassert its moral vision and develop appropriate forms of organization after an organizational split has allowed the emergence of a new center of labor activity. No such split seems imminent, but as in the 1890s and the 1930s, a broad and unorganized labor force—unorganized manufacturing workers, clerical and service workers, and “knowledge workers”—awaits organization. Meanwhile, it is difficult to envision the emergence of institutions able to rouse the essential “movement” response within the present organizational framework. Rather than responding to Americans’ desire for greater democracy, labor’s leadership sees greater centralization as a necessary defense in the crisis before it. Speaking about P-9 before a group of union officers, Hansen preached, “We can’t let this happen again, local autonomy be damned.” And during the same executive council meeting where he was dragged into the P-9 dispute, Lane Kirkland suggested a solution for avoiding further such incidents: “We [the AFL-CIO] must be part of the general staff at the inception, rather than the ambulance drivers at the bitter end.”³⁰

If they are to attract the unorganized, new labor institutions must build upon the themes of P-9. They must be decentralized, highly democratic, responsive, and communitarian. To show their dissimilarity to the cutthroat corporate world, the next generation of labor institutions must offer opportunity for individual achievement not gained at the expense of others, along with occasions for the exercise of selfless mutual support. They will have to draw strength from members’ friends and relations in the towns where they reside, and from a range of diverse organizational allies. And rather than depending upon bureaucratic coercion, they must win allegiance by demonstrating that labor’s traditional principles are more than a “necessary fiction.”

Some may object that without highly centralized structures, pattern bargaining, labor’s primary means of raising wages in the postwar world, would be impossible. But, as we have seen, pattern bargaining is a shambles in the meatpacking industry. And that industry is certainly not alone: The Big Three auto contracts, the rubber contracts, the National Master Freight Agreement, and the Bituminous Coal Agreement have all been undermined in the last few years. In 1986, the Steelworkers declared it no longer possible to negotiate a master contract and proceeded to work out separate deals with each of six major steelmakers. The Wall Street Journal recently found that plant-level union negotiations might have a greater cumulative impact than any national negotiations.³¹

Common wage rates among those who do similar work are still desirable, of course, provided they can be won within a decentralized structure. A “Packinghouse Workers’ Bill of Rights,” drawn up by former P-9 strikers and other rank-and-filers in the spring of 1987, illustrates workers’ desire to have it both ways. Among its 15 points, this Bill of Rights called for both “an international union made up of independent autonomous locals” and “an industry-wide master agreement.”³²

Recent developments within the Paperworkers’ union (UPIU) suggest some possibilities. For several years, International Paper Company successfully worked to eliminate any pattern among the locals representing some 20,000 workers at its ninety-odd U.S. facilities. Following up on the divisions it had won, in the spring and early summer of 1987 the company began demanding the elimination of premium pay for weekend work—in effect a 7 to 12 percent wage cut—and unlimited rights to subcontract work. As contracts began to expire, 1,200 workers in Mobile, Alabama, were locked out for refusing to accept the cuts; then 2,300 workers at three other locations struck.

In response to the company’s attempt to divide and conquer the various locals, the UPIU encouraged a rejection of the concessions in local voting and formation of a “pool,” under whose rules any subsequent offer would be voted on simultaneously by all the locals. A simple majority of all the combined memberships would suffice to ratify a proposal.

Although individual locals surrendered their identity in this pool approach—it would be possible for several to vote as a whole to reject and yet have a contract be approved—to a considerable degree the pool became a network coordinated by the locals and not dominated by the International. Its horizontal, local-to-local contact, rather than vertical contact by way of International officials, kept the pool standing firm against concessions. National events and pool meetings were set up by the locals. And ongoing “outreach” efforts, again organized by Ray Rogers and Corporate Campaign Inc., kept strikers out on the road from coast to coast, building communications among workers at the many IP locations.

In October 1988, facing decertification elections at the struck plants and drained of resources, the International indicated that it had had enough and encouraged the striking locals to call off their strikes. Those locals did so, once the other locals in the pool indicated that they had lost any hope of winning the strike. But even given this discouraging outcome, the Paperworkers’ pool structure suggests a possible model for greater local autonomy combined with coordinated bargaining.

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A yearning for community and mutual, ethical support can be seen not only among labor’s rank and file, but also in the wider culture. Such popular urges are expressed through philanthropic and religious activities—including such mass phenomena as charity “walkathons,” philanthropic rock concerts, “Hands Across America,” and even televangelism. Still on the periphery, “new age” gurus attract millions who seek the communal and individual solutions that seem to elude the society’s traditional organizations.

American corporations, influenced by what they know of successful Japanese practices, are tuning in to the popular urge for decentralization and mutual support. Their emphasis on “teamwork,” group problem-solving, and job enrichment represents an attempt to harness such popular sentiment to the wagon of corporate productivity and profit.

These themes are present in contemporary politics as well. Ronald Reagan’s attack on the federal bureaucracy may have contained an assault on the country’s poor and minorities and represented a boon for the upper classes. But at the heart of Reaganism was an attack on the governmental structures that Americans find unresponsive and amoral.

Few of these outlets combine P-9’s other ingredient, democracy. Indeed, there are few outlets for democracy in current American institutions. But the promise of American labor is that working people’s organizations can offer the rare combination of community, democracy, and “doing what is right.” Unless tomorrow’s labor institutions can respond to that promise, their future is highly uncertain.