III

SPREADING THE WORD

ARE HORMEL WORKERS STRIKING FOR 69¢? NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH! The package offered by the company was nothing less than a UNION BUSTER’S DREAM COME TRUE. Not only would it continue the 23% wage cut instituted over a year ago, it would also FREEZE WAGES OVER THE NEXT THREE YEARS and DESTROY VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE UNION PROTECTIONS won since the 1930’s. . . . THEY HAVE FORCED THIS STRIKE ON us—that’s why we are taking the fight to the doorsteps of Hormel plants and to branches of the company’s corporate partner, First Bank, throughout the Midwest.

—Local P-9 leaflet, September 1985

What a sense of exhilaration most P-9 members felt during the first weeks of their strike!

For years, they and their relatives had suffered bullying threats from Hormel: Do this or we might have to close the plant, do that or we might have to lay people off. They had seen dramatic changes in the nature of work and control of the shop floor between the old and new plants. They had submitted to one giveback after another—including the loss of the incentive system that made each worker feel that he had a real stake in the enterprise—and found themselves working harder and harder for less and less, supporting the ever more extravagantly paid corporate leaders who didn’t seem to regard the workers as human beings. Then, despite company promises that workers would never make less in the new plant, from out of the blue the company slashed their wages from $10.69 to $8.25 an hour.

In recent months, those indignities had been compounded when faceless arbitrators ruled that, yes, Hormel had the right to reduce their pay by 23 percent; and, yes, it could also reduce their benefits retroactively, and bill them for excess benefits already paid out; but, no, they could not strike in the spring of 1985. Then the company demanded even more in its only real contract proposal: a wage freeze for current workers at $10.00; a second, lower-wage tier for new workers ($8.00 per hour); an end to the 52-week notice of layoffs; no further consideration of “past practices” in grievance hearings; dramatically expanded management prerogatives; no change in procedures to make the plant more safe; and no adjustment in the out-of-sync contract expiration date.

The International union said that these disasters were largely P-9’s own fault for “breaking with the chain,” though it added that the company had gone too far in demanding a two-tier wage structure.¹ The Austin city council, the local Chamber of Commerce, and a “Committee for Positive Action” all demanded that P-9 drop its corporate campaign and just take the company’s contract offer before the town’s money tree withered away. The “committee” went so far as to post a full-sized billboard on Main Street reading “Ray Rogers Must Go,” and took out newspaper advertisements offering similarly worded bumper stickers.

And always there were the slights and biases of the area press: Local television station KAAL and the Austin Daily Herald were unabashed in their favoritism toward the company; the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and the Rochester Post-Bulletin were not much better. “Hormel CEO ‘cares and hurts’ but not giving in” read the headline of one Star and Tribune article, in which a reporter who regularly covered the conflict sighed, “There are times when Dick Knowlton lies awake at night and wonders why it’s happening.”² In early June, dissidents who opposed the campaign brought before the members a proposal to accept the $9.00- and $10.00-per-hour package that existed in other Hormel plants. This became, in essence, a vote on whether to discontinue or go ahead with the campaign. On the day before that vote, the Post-Bulletin carried a lengthy story, “Local P-9 at a crossroads,” that allowed dissidents (quoted but for the most part unnamed in the story), the company, and Lewie Anderson to attack the local’s campaign and misrepresent Corporate Campaign’s fees. The article was accompanied by a cartoon “done by dissident members” that depicted Rogers as a cheerleader whose only goal was money and who would be pleased if the plant closed.³ (Local members turned down the proposal—thus voting to continue the campaign—four to one.)

How fantastic, then, to do something more than vote: to take dramatic action and show all the know-it-alls that P-9 was not impressed with their knowledge. To show all who regarded them as merely means to Hormel’s ends that they were human beings and they were calling some shots here too.

In 1968 striking Memphis sanitation workers carried signs reading “I Am A Man.” It was a statement against the racism that had defined them as boys, but also a statement that they were human, no matter what the Memphis politicians said. Austin strikers’ first buttons read “P-9 Proud”; picket signs read “Families Fighting For Dignity.” They, too, felt the need to scream out their humanity to their employer. Carol Kough (whose husband, a striker, also served as Austin’s mayor) repeated a common sentiment to the Milwaukee Journal:

The workers have to raise their hands to go to the bathroom now. If they bring up any problem, they’re told there’s 5,000, 6,000 people waiting for their job. It’s very degrading. I think if people had their dignity and could say hello to the foreman, this would have been settled a long time ago.⁴

•   •   •

Rogers had begun planning for a strike months earlier. As the summer months passed, and a strike looked more and more likely, he began gathering maps of the surrounding area and familiarizing himself with the other towns in which Hormel had operations. Once the strike began, he conducted four two-hour meetings with rank-and-filers in which he described “the whole operation.”

The plan involved “canvassing” several hundred thousand homes across Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska, particularly those located in areas that were perceived to be liberal or sympathetic. Soon P-9 members were going door to door, distributing literature and discussing their issues in the Twin Cities and the small, outlying towns thereabouts; in the iron-ore region in and around Duluth; in Rochester; in Ottumwa, Iowa; and in Fremont, Nebraska. This literature included a special edition of The Unionist, “P-9 Fights Back,” which described the issues; a leaflet entitled “Who’s Behind Hormel’s Cold Cuts,” on the relations between the company and First Bank; and postcards that supporters could send to the bank’s board and to Hormel questioning the wage cut and other bank activities and demanding a reply. Soon another leaflet was added, “Shakedown at Hormel,” which showed a resolute P-9er with two guns pointing to his head, one held by a hand with a Hormel signet ring, the other by a hand with a First Bank ring. That leaflet repeated the strikers’ case and announced that the strike was underway; an edition intended for Iowa distribution pointed out that “Iowa workers and farmers are under attack from a corporate combine made up of Hormel, FDL Foods [which Hormel was taking over], First Bank System, and the Banks of Iowa,” of which First Bank owned 20 percent, intending to acquire the rest as soon as interstate banking laws allowed.

Following the initial literature distribution, the plan suggested that P-9ers should go out en masse to escalate pressure on the bank and to establish links with workers in other towns where Hormel had its key operations. According to Rogers, too often strikes lose power because workers remain isolated and inactive on picket lines in front of their plants while the company takes other steps to make up for the lost production. Rather than fall into this trap, P-9 would put a minimum number of pickets outside the Austin plant and send the rest out to build the fight across the country.⁵

Thus on August 23 a thousand strikers and supporters (including perhaps 200 from the Twin Cities) took their protest to First Bank headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. Their “bannering” line completely ringed the downtown block, and their loud chanting ("First Bank chooses, Austin loses”) distracted office workers from their labors. One union member reported handing out 300 leaflets in an hour. This went on from 10 A.M. till mid-afternoon, followed by further bannering at the bank’s suburban branches.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this approach came on August 26, when 300 P-9 members pulled out of Austin in a caravan of cars and motorcycles for a five-day tour of Dubuque, Ottumwa, Sioux City, Algona, and Knoxville, Iowa; Rochelle, Illinois; Beloit, Wisconsin; and Fremont, Nebraska. Hormel had facilities in all but Sioux City. In towns with Hormel plants, the strategy included leafleting every home in the town, then lining up P-9ers in front of the plant, not to block entry, but to show their potential strength and to greet workers as they came off shift. In Iowa the strikers also “bannered” Banks of Iowa branches, questioning whether First Bank’s intention to spread its empire across state lines truly benefited Iowans.

Rogers, Allen, and I traveled along with the caravan. Perhaps 25 men rode on big motorcycles, leading the way. The caravan that followed included cars, trucks, and recreational vehicles of every description. The three of us traveled in a rented Chevy Nova. It was tiny and slow compared with many of the other cars in the caravan, but nevertheless Rogers, who insisted on driving, pushed his way to the front of the pack whenever we fell behind.

With its rolling hills and pleasant, small-college campuses, Dubuque, the first stop on the tour, did not live up to my preconceptions of flat, characterless Iowa. But the FDL plant there was anything but pleasant: It was a long, rundown brick affair, situated down by the railroad tracks. Unlike more modern facilities that are surrounded by manicured grounds and set back from the road, the building stood right next to the sidewalk, so that any passerby could hear the final, all-too-human-sounding squeals of the pigs being slaughtered.

We spent a long, hot afternoon there. The 300 P-9ers stood along both sides of the road in front of the plant, waved and flashed their picket signs at the passing traffic, and attempted to engage FDL workers in conversation, over the objections of Business Agent Mel Moss and local executive board members, who handed out a counter-leaflet “provided by the national union.” P-9 had made arrangements to camp about four miles outside town, and the strikers invited any FDL workers they could speak with to come by that evening to share a keg and some conversation.

The FDL workers were particularly underprivileged: Fulltime workers earned only $7.75 per hour and part-timers, of whom the second shift was primarily composed, earned as little as $3.65 an hour. Few had ever seen their substandard union contract. Moss and other local officers attempted to play upon the disparity between the FDL and the Hormel wages, saying that the Austin people were greedy and presumptuous in asking the poorly paid FDL workers for “help.”

For all of these reasons, and because my experience had been that few Americans would come out for a night union meeting when they could be home watching “Three’s Company,” I was dubious that any FDL workers would come out.

But I was wrong. As P-9 vice president Lynn Huston recalled:

The local had about 15 to 20 older people who really knew something about unionism, and the rest were young people who were really scared and didn’t question anything Moss told them. That evening people started rolling in to see us, mostly young part-timers from the second shift. They’d bring big droves of people over to talk to me, to ask how things should work. They had no idea about how to bring up resolutions, and they didn’t know anything at all about the union’s grievance procedure. I couldn’t believe that they were ever in a union, because they knew absolutely nothing.

It was just unbelievable. Well, we talked for about two or three hours. Finally, one of them said, pointing to me: “This guy’s really smart—you ought to run him for office.” Some of our guys started smiling, and somebody finally said, “He’s our vice president.” These guys couldn’t believe it: “Jesus Christ, what happened to the pinstripe suit?” they said.⁶

Though nobody said so, Huston’s shoulder-length hair, earring, and hip manner probably made him seem an even less likely officeholder.

Many FDL workers had grievances similar to those of the Austin people, but it remained unclear whether they had the inclination to do anything about them. As one longtime worker recounted:

Seven years ago you’d work your ass off for the incentive, and then the company demanded that incentive pay be reduced by 15 percent. So, the people voted for it. Then they said we’re taking half of it away, and the people went along with it. Then they said we’re going to take the incentive pay altogether or move the plant. So, the people gave in to that too. Then the company bought plants in Rochelle and Milwaukee. They said, “Either you take a cut in wages or we’ll shift everything there.” Ultimately, they did shut the kill and cut, moving them to Rochelle.⁷

But in addition to those who expressed such grievances, there were among the FDL workers a number of “double dippers”—older workers who were looking forward to retirement, when they would collect pensions both from the plant’s former owner, Dubuque Packing, and from FDL. “They weren’t going to do anything that would risk their pensions, which could mean as much as $15.00 an hour,” reported P-9 member Merrell Evans.⁸

The next day we moved on to Ottumwa, 160 miles south of Dubuque and 300 from Austin. And the mild success of Dubuque in no way prepared us for what we found there.

Ottumwa had been a strong union town: In 1937, the United Packinghouse Workers had established a beachhead at the Morrell & Co. plant there—the site of a number of walkouts and strikes—and the United Auto Workers also had a strong local at the town’s John Deere facility. But Ottumwa had taken a real kicking when Morrell closed its plant, as the boarded-up windows of many small businesses showed. Earlier in the summer, when six carloads of P-9ers had come down to meet with supporters and to leaflet the town, there had been mixed reactions: Many people were fearful that P-9 would bring the problems of Austin to Ottumwa. But P-9 members in the late August caravan were greeted by their fellow Hormel workers like lost relations.

The strikers spent the morning leafleting neighborhoods and bannering at the Union Bank and Trust, one of the Banks of Iowa. Then we all went to the Hormel plant, which lies a good distance out from the center of town and sits back several hundred feet from the nearest road, safely behind a wire fence. There, along both sides of the road and extending 300 feet on each side of the plant, the Austin people threw up their most energetic informational picket of the trip during the hottest hours of the afternoon.

The reaction was electric. Truck drivers making deliveries to the plant and others who drove by showed enthusiastic agreement with the horn-shaped P-9 signs that urged them to “Honk For Labor.” From the dock at the rear of the plant, workers raised clenched fists to show solidarity with the P-9 members, who were by this point screaming themselves hoarse to be heard, chanting, “We’re gonna win, we’re gonna win.” And as each department came off work for the day, the workers walked to their cars, then drove past the fence and company security booth to the outside world, where P-9 leafleters greeted them and invited them to “come down to the campsite to roast the corporate weenie” that evening.

Hundreds of them did, assembling in an open-air pavilion. Again, Huston recalls the scene:

About 80 percent of the local’s membership came down to the city park where we were staying to hear what we had to say. After a while, since neither Guyette or Winkels was there, I got up to speak. I was sort of nervous, because there were maybe a thousand people there, and I wasn’t used to speaking in front of such large groups. I said something about how it was obvious that we had the same enemy and that I was happy to see the response they were giving us. At first, nobody said anything. Then, I saw that there was a whole line of people standing at the left side of the stage, waiting to speak.

One after another they got up and talked. They said they were so moved by what we were trying to do that they couldn’t help themselves. A lot of them had tears in their eyes. They said we had to stick together, that it was the only way we’d get fair treatment. This went on for about an hour and a half. It was a little bit like a religious meeting: Guys would say, “I haven’t always been a good union man, but I’m here to tell you now that I’ve changed.” About seven or eight said that they’d never been able to say the word “Austin” before without following it with the word “assholes.” They’d always wondered what Austin people looked like. Now, they said, “we know that you’re just like us.”

Thereafter, Huston said, Austin people, who’d frequently made Iowans the brunt of their jokes, “felt we couldn’t tell any Ioweejan jokes any more.”⁹

The next day, small groups went off to Algona, Knoxville, Rochelle, and Beloit, as the main body of the caravan set off for Fremont and a possible confrontation with the Nebraska state police. That state had a stiff—and probably unconstitutional—law that made it illegal to have more than two pickets within 50 feet of any entrance to the premises being picketed or any picket within 50 feet of any other picket. P-9’s officers and Rogers were not sure what to expect. “We were warned that the state troopers were waiting to attack us,” Rogers recalled. “I had visions of the sort of justice that the civil rights movement had faced in the South. And you know that the other side might send in professional troublemakers to start violence as a pretext for the police to smash you. As it turned out, though, we had the police eating out of our hands.”¹⁰

The Nebraska state police had also been warned: The company had said to them that they should expect a violent scene as had occurred in past IBP strikes, with P-9ers attempting to beat up the Fremont workers. In fact, P-9ers intended just the opposite. Just as in Ottumwa, the strikers fanned out along the plant’s perimeter road, immediately establishing an atmosphere much more like a celebration than a riot. Women and small children from Austin and Fremont were present. And, as ever, P-9 spokespeople and Rogers exuded courtesy and goodwill, following the instructions of the police—who were lined along the opposite side of the road—to the letter.

Several of the Fremont workers had worked in Austin, and others had family ties to the Austin workers. Thus, as they came out of the plant and crossed the road to the parking lot, there were greetings, shouted nicknames, and handshakes. The scene was only slightly less exuberant than in Ottumwa, to the puzzlement of the state police, who were left standing around idle, suffering through the sweltering afternoon heat with the rest of us. Before long, P-9 members were offering them water. At the end of the day, P-9 member Al McDowell, who had become a star performer via the union’s bullhorn, effusively congratulated the State Patrol on their performance and thanked them for being there.

A meeting to discuss the crises facing Hormel workers was held at Fremont UFCW Local 22’s hall that evening. The small auditorium was packed with several hundred workers, though only one local executive board member came, and local president “Skip” Niederdeppe announced that he had to be out of town.

The tone of the meeting was much more sober than that in Ottumwa. Guyette, who had rejoined the caravan after missing the Ottumwa activities, announced that P-9 had come to break down any barriers that existed and to answer any questions that the Local 22 members might have. He described the UFCW’s retrenchment policy and the way that the spiral of concessions never seemed to stop. He told how during P-9’s negotiations, “it became clear to us that the company was positioning for impasse,” refusing to move from its final offer or to consider any contract expiration date that would put P-9 in sync with the expiration of any other Hormel contract. He described how the company-First Bank ties were reproduced in ties between the recent Hormel acquisition FDL and the Banks of Iowa, which shared board members. Finally, he turned to the topic that everyone understood as our real reason for being there, the possibility of Austin’s extending its picket lines to Fremont:

The International has told us that we must get their sanction before we can have any roving picket lines. But federal labor law says that we have the right to follow our struck work [when it is farmed out to other plants]. We intend to take advantage of that law. Right now we’re only doing informational stuff and putting our real pressure on the bank. But if we get into a situation where people are taking our jobs, we may not do a lot of asking [for sanction]. And if we get into a situation where everybody is out in Ottumwa and Fremont, nobody in Austin will go back until everybody in Ottumwa and Fremont goes back.¹¹

Many Fremont workers present took exception to Guyette’s comments, frequently raising questions about P-9’s past behavior. “We were told that there was a chain motion to support whatever P-9 wanted and you turned down our help. Is that true?” one worker asked. He was told that the motion was instead to help P-9 “achieve the chain agreement” of $10.00—in essence a resolution to cease its fight against concessions. “Skip told us P-9 broke away from us and don’t want to have nothing to do with us because they feel they can do better on their own. Yes or no, was that said?” another asked. He was given a long account of Anderson’s demand that the P-9 board “guarantee” support for a 1984 chain-wide strike in spite of its ongoing contract’s no-strike pledge, and how P-9 was called a “noose around the neck of the chain” because it could negotiate only on wages and not on benefits as well, as the other locals wished. “We didn’t remove ourselves from the chain—obviously we walked because we didn’t fly or hop out—but we were congratulated by the others for stepping aside and allowing them to go ahead with their negotiations while we arbitrated ours,” Guyette responded.

Rogers answered questions about how much Corporate Campaign was charging, countering accusations made in a recently released UFCW report that CO was bankrupting the local.

A number of Fremont workers stood up for the Austin strikers. Said one: “We’re increasing our production—up by 5 percent two weeks ago—to keep you guys out of work. And our bargaining committee people say we have to do it till we can arbitrate the issue. I say we ought to have a new election of officers and get these people the hell out of here.” A woman said, “We’re getting a little tired of being fooled. We’ve all got to get together.”

Many wished to know how much money the local ought to send to help the strikers. Others said that Local 22 ought to be more like P-9, showing some pride by getting Local 22 hats and turning out in force for membership meetings. And a number expressed uncertainty about what was in their contract and wanted to know whether they had the right to honor a roving picket, since that contract remained unsigned.¹²

Like the one in Ottumwa, the Fremont meeting was a major step forward for rank-and-file unionism in that it allowed the average Hormel meatpacker to see and speak with counterparts from another local. But it also illustrated the heavy obstacles standing in the way of further such development—the distrust and uncertainty encouraged by the company and rival union officials over the years. Ottumwa had provided a heady draught of deeply felt commonality; but the Fremont meeting showed that more than deep feelings were needed if P-9 was to bring about a revival of democratic meatpacker unionism in the Midwest.

There were fundamental differences between the work forces of the two plants: Ottumwa, which had only opened in 1974, had almost all young workers. In Fremont—already an old plant when the company acquired it in 1947—the average worker was in his fifties, and perhaps half of the work force had 25 years seniority. “Fifty percent of these older workers just want to get their two more years in and retire,” said one younger Fremont worker at the meeting. “They don’t care what happens to the young guys, who are getting screwed.” Whether as part of a conscious plan or not, those older workers also tended to “talk Austin down,” in Huston’s words.

In Ottumwa, there were more people who had been transferred from plant to plant, people who had experienced some abuse at the hands of the company. And as a group they had been coerced into taking the 1984 concessionary contract. Fremont workers, on the other hand, had often been favored by the company: Their contract was better than Ottumwa’s, and they were allowed to keep the production system longer than any other plant.¹³

Still, the Fremont workers were, like the Ottumwans, impressed with the size of the caravan and the enthusiasm and confidence of the strikers. “You could look out of the plant lobby and see that there were 300 people out there lining the road,” recalled Local 22 member Bob Langemeier, who became a key P-9 supporter. “Everyone had to be impressed that so many people came all that way—especially when we couldn’t get 20 people to come to a union meeting across town.”¹⁴

Though I was amazed at the response that the P-9 caravan elicited, Rogers was not. “The caravan, like everything else I’ve come up with, was just pure common sense,” he told me. “You have to make a big impact in such times, to make a show of strength. We’d done the organization, we’d sent people on ahead of us, and we’d built the spirit. When people see something like that, they want a piece of it—they feel they’ve just got to see this, they’ve got to touch it.”¹⁵

“It was a new and brilliant tactic thought up by Ray,” Guyette said later. “Or, if he didn’t think it up, it was a tactic that had been lost. I didn’t know what kind of reaction we’d get, but I felt people were upset in all the plants, that they were hungry for information, and they felt that the UFCW was withholding important information from them. The caravan put a lot of local officers in a difficult position: They couldn’t tell their people not to talk to us, yet they feared that we might wake up a sleeping giant.”¹⁶

Sunburned and bone weary, we departed the next morning, winding our way back to Austin by way of Sioux City, Iowa. There, we threw up a brief informational picket in front of the First National Bank. It proved a good end to the trip, as local citizens waved and shouted their enthusiastic support for P-9. A Swift Independent meatpacking plant had closed on the very day of our arrival, so Sioux City residents felt a special identity with the strikers. Television crews and journalists of every description showed up to find out about the union campaign and to question the members about their caravan. And the hit-and-run picketing even drew a positive mention from the bank’s chief officer, who told reporters that he had “no problem” with what the union members were doing.

Hormel Senior Vice President and General Counsel Charles Nyberg did have a problem, though. So did the UFCW.

Nyberg had followed the caravan on each step of its journey, to offer the company’s side of the story to the press and “to observe firsthand what kind of picketing is taking place and what kind of messages they’re spreading.”¹⁷ On the final day of the trip, signs of corporate nervousness showed through as Nyberg denounced the Nebraska state police for failing to enforce the state’s anti-picketing law against P-9. The official in charge of the patrol, concealing his anger, responded that the pickets had presented no threat to public safety by appearing at the Fremont plant.¹⁸

From Ottumwa, Local 431 secretary-treasurer Louis De-Frieze spoke for UFCW officialdom in characterizing P-9’s caravan. “Their whole program is to cause disunity, spread venom and make people dissatisfied with their union,” he told the Minneapolis Star and Tribune.¹⁹

•   •   •

Back in Austin, rank-and-filers had begun to organize a plethora of committees: There were committees to encourage food donations and manage distribution, to staff an emergency hotline referring members with problems (ranging from stress to heat and utilities shutoffs) to helpful parties, to renovate the union hall, and to provide security and constant contact with the picket teams at the Hormel plant gates. A clothing committee set up a showroom in the basement of the hall that was filled with donated garments. A kitchen committee cooked up great vats of soup or stew and piles of sandwiches, available to anyone with an appetite at lunch- and dinnertime.

In the war room, the United Support Group, supervised by Guyette’s mother-in-law, Lorraine Fossum, oversaw regular assembly-line mass mailings, with lists and materials provided by Corporate Campaign. The first 50,000-piece mailing (which became the prototype for the several others that would follow) encouraged readers to join the fight against Hormel’s “concessions shakedown” by donating to P-9’s Emergency and Hardship Fund.

The Communications Committee oversaw the small teams that went out to speak to union gatherings across the country. And a sign committee organized customized and mass production of hundreds of signs for picketing, erected a ten-foot-high fist emblazoned “Solidarity Growing” to stand outside the union hall, drew a huge map of the United States that pinpointed the sources of financial aid coming in to the local, and painted a six-panel wall mural depicting the struggles of American workers since the country’s founding.

Committees’ weekly meetings and daily activities led numerous observers to characterize the union hall as “a beehive of activity.” But it also became a place where strikers came merely to hang out and gossip, to try out ideas for other activities on each other, the local officers, and Rogers—who regularly had a line of members standing outside the Unionist office that he had claimed as a base of operations. Striker Cecil Cain described the scene: “On the third day of the strike we met with Ray, each person describing what he’d do. I spent two days leafleting in Rochester. Then one Thursday I went by the hall and it was chaos. I realized that we needed somebody up front to direct traffic.” Thus Cain became first a traffic cop, then custodian of a card file through which the local kept track of each striker’s activity. In time he also made out weekly bar graphs that showed how many members had put in the required six hours work, and how many were above or below average, based on information received from the coordinators of each committee. When it was discovered that a striker was not doing enough, he or she was telephoned and encouraged to do more. (Cain’s notes from December, one of the most intense periods of the strike, show that around five hundred were putting in an above-average number of hours, while nine-hundred-odd others were below average.)²⁰

The traffic cop function became all the more important in early September, with the first of many big events that drew crowds of outside supporters to Austin. Back in March 1985, a Twin Cities Support Committee had been formed by Macalester College professor Peter Rachleff, UAW Local 879 president Tom Laney, Carleton College professor Paul Wellstone, steel worker Dave Foster, and many others. That committee and member unions, including Laney’s Ford local in St. Paul and the Minnesota Education Association, became the first to sponsor a food caravan—composed of dozens of cars and vans and a semi truck filled with bread, potatoes, canned goods, and other staples.

“Hormel is not going to starve you out, we’re going to see to that,” Bud Schulte, a former meatpacker at the closed Iowa Pork plant in St. Paul, told the hundreds of P-9ers who rallied at a nearby baseball park after the delivery. The delivery was a big morale booster, encouraging P-9 to send out representatives to build support groups elsewhere, including, immediately, Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, California, and New York.²¹

•   •   •

While the 300 P-9ers were touring through Iowa and Nebraska, there were two developments that boded ill for the union campaign. On August 20, Hormel announced that it had earned $9.5 million in its third quarter, an 83.6 percent increase over the level a year earlier.²²

Whether or not this demonstrated that the company did not need wage concessions to stay competitive, it indicated that Hormel was in a strong position to withstand both a strike and a pressure campaign aimed at its financial backers.

Then, on August 28, the company announced that it was implementing its’ final contract offer—though it had no intention of opening the plant for “probably three months or longer”—and that it had filed a complaint of an unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Board, asking it to seek a federal court injunction to block further union activities at First Bank. “We feel Local P-9 and Corporate Campaign have been engaged in illegal secondary boycott activities almost from the day Corporate Campaign came to Austin,” Nyberg said.²³ Hormel followed its complaints about Minnesota activity with complaints alleging similar secondary activity in Nebraska and Iowa (eventually, five such complaints were lodged).²⁴

Guyette and Rogers responded positively to the secondary boycott charges when informed of them during P-9’s five-day road trip. “We didn’t threaten, coerce or restrain anybody,” said Guyette. “It’s obvious that the bank and the company are feeling the heat.” “When Jim told me about the charges over the phone, I said, That’s great news,’” Rogers announced to the gathering in Fremont. “Why? Because the company is feeling so much pressure that they have to take extreme measures to intimidate us. The campaign is working.”²⁵ And Rogers carried on the bank campaign by taking a caravan of 80 union members to Duluth, where, after neighborhood canvassing, they joined with other unionists and members of Citizens Organizations Acting Together (COACT) to banner First Bank Duluth’s downtown office.²⁶

But on September 9 the NLRB’s regional office ruled that picketing and distributing handbills outside First Bank branches did in fact constitute an illegal secondary boycott and moved to get a federal injunction that would give the ruling the force of law.²⁷

P-9’s leaders saw the ruling as an attack upon their basic rights. “This is something that could eventually go to the highest court in the land,” Pete Winkels told a reporter. “We have rights that are guaranteed us under the Constitution, and we are talking about something that transcends this labor dispute. People have the right to demonstrate peacefully, and I don’t think any company or bank can say that we can or can’t do that.”²⁸

The very day after the NLRB ruling, 80 P-9ers were stretched out across three blocks in front of Des Moines’ Valley National Bank (part of the Banks of Iowa system). “Keep 1st Bank Out of Iowa,” their signs read, along with “Stop Hormel Greed.” “Union members did not try to stop work on downtown construction projects and did not impede traffic into the bank,” reported the Associated Press, “but their chants—and the horns of sympathizing truckers and other motorists—echoed off downtown buildings and could be heard for blocks.”²⁹

The next day 400 bannered First Bank St. Paul, competing in volume with the University of Minnesota cheerleaders’ and band’s “Salute to [Coach] Lew Holtz and the Golden Gophers,” which was taking place in Federal Plaza across the street. “Lew Holtz has his fight and we have ours,” said one P-9 member. Cheerleaders crossed the street to give Gopher buttons to the meatpackers, some of whom switched from union chants to “Win, Gophers, Win.” However, the Gophers did not join P-9 as it went off to picket the NLRB’s Minneapolis office.³⁰

Thereafter, P-9 could be seen at First Bank branches or those of related banks in Rochester, Albert Lea, and Austin. A caravan of 200 also went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to extend the hand of solidarity to a group of Morrell workers who had gone on strike September 1 over company demands to reduce wages to $8.00 an hour—a 75-cent cut. Austin workers joined the Morrell strikers’ picket line and invited them to visit the P-9 campsite, even though UFCW staff attempted to block their path. The strikers also bannered at First Bank of South Dakota.³¹

On September 23, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Devitt—who would in time become a P-9 nemesis—issued a temporary injunction prohibiting any further First Bank activities.

In front of two hundred strikers who had filed through metal detectors to get into the courtroom, Devitt listened to NLRB attorney James Fox argue that First Bank had no control over Hormel and that it was a distinct and separate entity. Attorneys representing P-9 and Corporate Campaign included Jim Youngdahl, a portly, bearded Little Rock native who had often dealt with the secondary boycott question, and Rick MacPherson. They argued that P-9’s First Amendment rights should not be abridged, and that First Bank was far from neutral. But in a ruling prepared and typed before the oral arguments were even delivered, Devitt found for Fox, saying that there was reasonable cause to believe that the offense had been committed. He left the merits of the case to be heard by an administrative law judge the following week.³²

The next Wednesday, though, instead of the drawn-out battle that was anticipated, Administrative Law Judge Harold Bernard, Jr., forced the NLRB to come to an immediate settlement with P-9. Five hours of caucusing took the place of courtroom wrangling, after the NLRB’s Fox proved unable to explain how P-9 members’ First Bank actions could be restricted without their free-speech rights’ being abridged.

Under the settlement, the Hormel complaint against P-9 would be dropped. The union still faced the restrictions of Devitt’s injunction that forbade “threatening, coercing or restraining” those engaged at commerce at First Bank; but since P-9 maintained that it had never “threatened, coerced or restrained” anyone, local leaders and attorneys said that the injunction allowed almost everything they had done before. (NLRB attorneys Fox and Ronald Sharp showed their confusion, stating that the injunction was still in effect and that “nothing had changed since yesterday,” but adding, “We never alleged that Corporate Campaign as a whole was in violation.”) The injunction would be dropped as soon as the NLRB’s Washington office approved the settlement. And in the future, all such considerations would be taken up directly in federal court, not before the NLRB, because of the considerable First Amendment questions involved.³³

These First Amendment issues were crucial. It seems likely that both Devitt and Hormel had overdone it: Devitt had issued a very broad injunction, ruling out virtually all activities involving First Bank and ignoring the National Labor Relations Act’s “publicity proviso,” which states that the rule against secondary boycotts cannot restrict free speech. Meanwhile, a Hormel lawyer had gone so far as to say that the workers’ free-speech rights should be suspended until the issue was decided.³⁴ This drew the attention of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. It led Minneapolis attorney Margaret Winter, already supporting the union as an activist, Emily Bass, then a partner in the New York law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman, and colleague Linda Backiel to begin working on an amicus brief, funded by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, that would argue these constitutional issues. It also made the case a hot potato that Bernard was anxious to avoid.

Simultaneous with these developments, P-9 experienced another grudging affirmation—this one from the Minnesota AFL-CIO. After seeing Judge Devitt rule against them, the 200 P-9 members trooped over two blocks to the St. Paul Radisson Hotel, where the state federation was holding its convention. AFL-CIO officials had been ignoring the issue of the strike, as they thought the UFCW would prefer. But once the strikers arrived and lined up outside the doors of the convention hall to shake hands with delegates, the subject of the strike could no longer be avoided. Guyette and other local officers, official delegates to the convention, received a standing ovation as they filed in.

Guyette was not allowed to address the convention—there were too many groups on strike, the AFL officials said, and so, in the interest of fairness, no one could be allowed to talk. But the local passed around a letter from Winkels describing the reasons for the strike. In it he noted:

There is now a letter circulating from UFCW President William Wynn to Lane Kirkland stating that P-9 “unilaterally withdrew from chain negotiation.” Mr. Wynn has made a grievous error and did a great deal of damage from this false and misleading statement. P-9 was not even invited to these negotiations. . . . We see politics taking precedence over people. We read in the papers that the AFL-CIO has taken a “hands off” policy toward our strike. We hear of other unions denying support because of unfounded rumors. We are not allowed to address this convention for trade unionists in Minnesota because we did not get permission from someone in Washington, D.C

Please feel free to ask us anything you want or need to know. The people of this state have had a tradition and history of being able to assess and make their own decisions. We have enough faith in you to do likewise. . . . As Edmund Burke said 200 years ago, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.”³⁵

Dan Gustafson, state federation president, ordered that a collection be taken on the floor for all strikers, and the gathering passed a resolution “in support of all unions engaged in properly sanctioned strikes and for a just and fair resolution of the issues of the workers of Local P-9.”³⁶

Note that, in this wording, the issues belonged to “the workers” of P-9, rather than to the local as a whole, including its officers. Such were the continuing concessions to the UFCW. But the resolution was an endorsement of the strike, nonetheless, which gave locals official sanction to send food and money and to come in person to Austin. And that would be very important in the weeks to come.