I

“FAMILIES FIGHTING BACK”

Austin, Minnesota, is the all-American company town, located about a hundred miles south of Minneapolis, not far from the Iowa border. At first glance, the town’s several thousand trim houses and manicured lawns, as well as its public schools and playing fields, seem immune to the passage of time. When men here talk about driving over to Green Bay for a Packers’ game, it is easy to imagine that Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr are still playing.

You can travel most of the way to Austin from the Twin Cities via the Interstate, but just south of Owatonna you have to get off and continue down two-lane Highway 218 for the last 31 miles. When you pass Lansing Corners, the restaurant that is the only sign of life in the patch of ground known as Lansing, you are on the outskirts of Austin. In late 1986, there appeared another noteworthy signpost near Lansing: the words “Scab City” scrawled in three-foot-high letters on a dilapidated old barn near the roadside.

In December 1984 Austin became the site of a bitter union battle with the town’s primary employer, Geo. A. Hormel & Co. Many observers say it turned into the strike of the decade, both because of the energy and imagination of the strikers and because of the nationwide response it aroused.

Before the strike began, the 1,500 workers began organizing support groups from various constituencies in Austin, then in other towns where Hormel had plants, such as Fremont, Nebraska, and Ottumwa, Iowa. Rank-and-file speakers took their anti-concessions message to picket lines and farmer, community, church, and political meetings—first in Minnesota, then across the Midwest, then from coast to coast. Once the strike was on, hundreds of workers joined car caravans for tours through the other Hormel towns, where they re-established the worker-to-worker ties that had first been forged in the 1930s, but that had atrophied since. Union literature was distributed door to door in dozens of towns and through the mails to thousands of American union members.

Over three thousand unions and other organizations from every state responded. Supporters from across the country came to Austin to attend mass demonstrations, marches, and rallies. Thousands sent letters of support, food, and funds and joined in the anti-Hormel protest activities that took place in virtually every U.S. city.

But in the end the strikers were defeated by the combined forces of the company, the state of Minnesota—which sent in National Guard troops to escort strikebreakers into the plant—and their own International union, the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Since the spring of 1986, the company has been smugly proclaiming victory and asserting that it foresees no need ever to rehire the replaced strikers. Even more outrageous from the strikers’ point of view is the fact that after a period of trusteeship, or removal of local control, imposed by the UFCW to bring an end to the strike, union Local P-9 is being run by and for a membership composed of “scabs”: those strikers who crossed their own picket line and the “replacement workers” who also crossed. During the trusteeship, the International signed a strike settlement with Hormel that gave the scabs priority job rights and severely limited the legally provided recall rights of those who stayed out, among other things cutting off all their claims to the jobs after September 1988. And the 1,000 loyal union people were issued withdrawal cards, forcing them out of the union altogether. There are many signs that suggest that the loyalists will never give up the fight. But they are aware that, for the moment at least, the bosses and their creatures, the scabs, have the upper hand.

The most direct way of coming into downtown Austin is to turn left off 218 at the Sunset Motel, and that road will take you right down to Main Street. Going this way, you pass many of the town’s important institutions: On your left at the first stoplight is the graveyard where company founder George Hormel is buried, and in winter, when there are no leaves on the trees, you can catch a first glimpse of the company’s plant off in the distance. Down the road on your right is the Austin shopping mall, a direct result of the good wages paid to the generations who worked for the meatpacker. On further, you pass the YMCA, St. Olaf’s Hospital, and the A&W Root Beer drive-in before you get to Main Street’s stores and the Austin Law Enforcement Center, which houses the sheriff’s office and the jail.

I first came down these roads in 1985 in order to document the serious problem of on-the-job injuries sustained by the Austin meatpackers. I had recently gone to work for Ray Rogers’ union consulting firm, Corporate Campaign Inc., which had been hired by local union members, after a lot of wrangling with UFCW, their international, to run a campaign to pressure Hormel into reversing a unilaterally imposed 23 percent wage cut. Having worked with a lot of union men and women before, I thought I knew what the people here would be like: folksy but not too articulate or thoughtful, pro-union because they wanted to live ordinary lives outside the shadow of poverty. The flat, wintry landscape didn’t seem to promise anything exceptional—March was still the dead of winter, though on my first trip no snow covered the fields where the rich, black earth waited to be turned for another year’s corn crop.

Meatpacking is the most dangerous occupation in the United States. In 1986 Hormel predicted that some 36 percent of the Austin workers would be disabled in the coming year through a workplace injury; that same year, workers say they saw company reports showing the total injury rate to be 202 percent.¹ Over a period of several days, I listened to a litany of horrors, as a steady stream of workers came forth to describe the tendonitis, shoulder, arm, back, and hand injuries, and nervous disorders brought on by the rapid and demanding work at Hormel’s state-of-the-art plant.

As I listened, I discovered among the Austin meatpackers a particular difference from the New York union members I had known. When the effort to roll back concessions at Hormel first began, some Austin union members felt that they should not have to take a pay cut, even though other meatpacking workers might have to. Those people said that Austin workers should make more than the average wage, since they had to work harder and faster and their plant was the most productive of all the Hormel plants. What’s more, it was said, the townspeople had always had a special relationship to the company and the Hormel family. A confused pride in working ability and hometown colored the thinking of many.

It may be that such responses were more characteristic of workers who had lived in Austin longer, or maybe they were simply expedient arguments that some people hoped would flatter the company into seeing things their way. But you heard such statements all the time.

This way of seeing things did not last, though. The great majority of the current work force had never experienced any special relationship with Hormel. They had been at the company for only two or three years; some had worked at other meatpackers or other Hormel plants and saw nothing special about work in the Austin plant, except possibly the high speed of the line.

So the “we-ought-to-get-more” argument quickly fell by the wayside, replaced by the argument that concessions, particularly from a profitable industry leader such as Hormel, do not serve the workers’ long- or short-run interests and must be fought. At bottom, Austin meatpackers felt intensely that they had been swindled. On many occasions, they said, the company had promised never to pay them less than they were making when the new plant opened. “When I was hired on the 25th of October, 1982, they told me: ‘You’re going to be working for George A. Hormel. Go out and buy yourself a car . . . buy yourself a home,’” recalled Darrell Busker. “You established yourself at one level, then suddenly you were down to $8.25.”²

The larger social vision of the local members, like that of most Americans, was contradictory. In one sense, it was conservative. As their ever-present “Families Fighting Back” signs indicated, the Austin workers wanted to hold on to what they had, to preserve a middle-income way of life that they saw being threatened by industrial change. Older workers in particular longed for the days of paternalistic management at the company, days when “Jay Hormel Cared,” in the words of signs that they later posted around town. But out of such instincts grew a resolve to take a stand that would mean a better future for all American workers, to roll back “corporate greed,” and to reform a labor movement that had grown bureaucratic, insensitive, and pro-corporate.

In time, the Austin campaign and strike would literally transform P-9ers’ lives and ideals. Many of these Scandinavian midwesterners voted for Ronald Reagan; yet in May of 1986, as the workers’ national union was attempting to bring an end to the strike and restore businesslike relations with the company, a thousand of these people turned out to dedicate a mural painted on the side of their union hall to the South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela.

The workers and their family members were helped toward this transformation by their unusual leaders—including hometown boy and local union president Jim Guyette and outside “consultant” Ray Rogers—and by a great many others who, once the crusade was underway, made their way to Austin as if to Mecca.

Rogers is a short, heavily muscled, dimple-faced man on the other side of 40 with few interests outside of work for social justice and vegetarianism. In the tradition of a long line of abstemious true believers such as Ralph Nader, he has few needs in the way of clothing or food. Gastronomic indulgence means popcorn or ice cream. For office furniture, nothing could be better than a card table. His idea of a blissful vacation, he once told me, would be to take two weeks off, go somewhere with nice weather, and just lift weights till he got in really good shape.

Self-confidence runs deep in Rogers’ personality. In the darkest days of the strike, he would express weariness and some impatience to get it over with, but almost never allowed himself a discouraging word. He always had time to listen carefully to the ideas of every rank-and-filer—and there were some doozies: “I saw the National Guard driving the wrong way down a one-way street,” I remember one worker saying. “Can’t we do something like get them arrested for reckless driving?”

Over the years Rogers has developed a rousing speaking style to rival that of the most fervent hellfire preacher. Still, some have accused him of arrogance and called him a publicity addict. “Why does he have to go on TV all the time—why does he put himself forward in the newspapers like he does?” critics ask.

Such criticisms miss the point. Unlike many big-time union leaders, Rogers is not interested in notoriety per se, but only as a means of reaching a goal. He genuinely tried to put others, particularly the local union officers, forward as spokespeople. But in the end he was often fearful that unless he spoke up, something might get left out—the message might lack that one bit of information, backed by energy and enthusiasm, that would sway the audience to join the cause.

“You can create a moment in history where people will turn to Austin and say, ‘That is where they turned back the onslaught against the labor movement.’” Thus did Rogers promise the Austin workers a place in the history books.

The unusual thing about it was not the rhetoric, but the fact that the workers took Rogers up on this offer, made before a January 1985 rally of 3,000 townspeople in the Austin High School auditorium. In the ordinary course of events, you expect JFK-inspired liberals, Marxists, or even New Rightists to respond to the tug of “history.” But when average working people put down their tools and set aside family responsibilities for such an abstract proposition, something is happening.

Not that all of the rhetoric was abstract: Guyette, for example, was a master of particulars. On the surface, Guyette bears little resemblance to Rogers: Tall, blond, and soft-spoken, he is as cool and cautious as Rogers is hot. They are media opposites, Rogers playing well to live audiences, Guyette playing perfectly on television. Guyette was no Nader, but rather, with his three fair-haired and ridiculously polite children and his pretty, equally committed and outspoken wife, the picture of a family man. When he spoke in his soft, sometimes whispery voice, people sat up.

“Hormel is a very profitable company, Oscar Mayer is a very profitable company, and they ought to be paying the highest wages in the industry,” he would tell an audience of meatpackers from another Hormel plant in Fremont, Nebraska.

They ought to bring the bottom of the industry up, rather than what’s been happening, with the top of the industry being brought down. But the industry really wants $5.00 or $6.00 wage rates. People ought to understand that we’re going to have to defend something at some point. It may as well be 10.69 or $10.00, rather than let it slide to $8.00 or $6.00. How far it goes depends on us, because the companies are going to keep pushing until we tell them that we’ve had enough—we’re not gonna give any more.

Neither argument moved the workers’ International union, which opposed the campaign from the beginning—not, UFCW leaders insisted, because they were sellouts, but, they said, because their national strategy dictated that they do so.

International officers such as Lewie Anderson, director of the union’s Packinghouse Division, held ideals that were every bit as contradictory as the P-9ers’. A hog-manure shoveler in the Sioux City, Iowa, stockyards at age 14, then a local union leader during several violent strikes at beef packer IBP, Anderson was groomed for his position by Jessie Prosten and other “progressives” out of the tradition of one of the CIO’s old “red” unions, the United Packinghouse Workers of America. He was on the left-liberal side of most current political and social issues. And for years he opposed concessions. In 1980 and 1981, just after he became Packinghouse Division director, he was faced with numerous locals that were adamantly in favor of giving wage concessions in order to save jobs. Anderson and others took a hard line, saying that giving concessions would not save anything.³

As a consequence, Anderson oversaw a number of plant closings, arguing that it was more important to hold on to a livable national wage rate for the majority of workers than to allow weak packers to continue operating at the expense of that rate. But by 1984 Anderson had signed on to a strategy that was dubbed “a controlled retreat” by International president William Wynn. In its most basic form, the idea was to allow wages to fall to a certain level among unionized packers, while simultaneously organizing nonunion packers and raising their wages, in order to get to a single “national” rate. In other words, the union wanted to reconstruct pattern bargaining. Once a national pattern was re-established, the strategy suggested, union locals would rally, and all would together push wages back up again.

Anderson was never a strong supporter of democratic procedure. Rather, he helped to promote a UFCW catchphrase that “leaders must lead”—they must make the tough choices that the members will not make. And this was his method during both the period in which he opposed concessions and the period in which he favored letting wages fall: As late as 1983, he put a Perry, Iowa, Oscar Mayer local into trusteeship for going too far in granting givebacks. Perhaps the repeated experience of opposing locals that wanted to give in got him accustomed to opposing rank-and-file activity. Then, under the new strategy, he became allied with the corporate drive to depress wages at long-organized packers such as Hormel.

Over time, the International worked hard on behalf of Hormel, regularly and repeatedly declaring that P-9 had chosen “the wrong target at the wrong time,” attacking the local officers as “inexperienced” leaders of a “suicide mission,” falsely declaring the local “nearly bankrupt” on the eve of the strike largely because of Corporate Campaign’s bills, delivering mass mailings to AFL-CIO affiliates across the country to discourage them from sending money to the local, sending a “special organizing team” of spies in to find a pretext for putting the local into trusteeship, and finally ending the strike, imposing a trusteeship, and agreeing to a formal strike settlement with the company that virtually ensures that no striker will ever return.⁴ It worked so hard, in fact, that P-9 members inevitably speculated that some of the national officers must be getting an extra payday.

But, as I have said, Anderson and other International officers also saw themselves as defending the best traditions of American unionism. They resorted to extraordinary measures to undermine the local. But they felt themselves bitterly misunderstood: Why couldn’t the workers and their supporters see that there would be a better day if everybody worked together under the direction of UFCW officers and staff professionals? The UFCW must be allowed to coordinate the struggle, to choose the time and place to confront corporate greed.

In the eyes of many mid western meatpackers, it came to seem that that time and place might never come. It was always much easier, it seems, for Anderson to cut a deal behind the scenes—another pay cut, “the best we can do this year,” we have to “live to fight another day,” etc., etc. As Fred Carson, a former local vice president at the Armour plant in Mason City, Iowa, told me: “Anderson is such a big shot, he don’t ever want a strike. He’d rather shove a contract down your throat—make you vote over and over on it till you get it right.”⁵ All across the Midwest, there are workers who share Carson’s bitter memories and low opinion of Anderson.

P-9 business agent Pete Winkels, a chubby, chain-smoking roadside philosopher, expressed a common rank-and-file sentiment during an August 1985 meeting with Hormel workers in Ottumwa, Iowa. Winkels said he had stopped at a farmer’s house on the drive down from Austin and asked to use the facilities. While he was in the outhouse, he said, a UFCW representative also came in. Then, somehow, the UFCW man accidently dropped a dollar bill down the hole into the excrement below. As an astonished Winkels looked on, the rep proceeded to throw in his wallet, followed by his gold watch and his gold rings. “Why did you do that?” Winkels said he asked the representative. The rep replied: “You don’t think I’m going down there just for a lousy dollar, do you?”

•   •   •

Between the fall of 1984 and the spring of 1985, P-9’s members and supporters became a very organized and active bunch. Significantly, the first group to get organized was not the workers at all, but their spouses—primarily wives and a few husbands—who were outraged by the immediate effect the wage cut was having on their families.

The United Support Group was probably born when Jeannie Bambrick, a worker’s wife, telephoned Guyette’s wife, Vicky, to say that the women should do something. They decided to call a meeting of spouses on a late September evening in a local park. The turnout was tremendous: 300 women and men attended. Like Bambrick and Guyette, few had known each other beforehand. “Jim would tell me stories of the other men in the plant,” explained Vicky Guyette, “but I never knew them, and I certainly didn’t know their wives.”⁶

As it got dark, the meeting continued, with no light except from the few flashlights some had brought along. The gathering was determined to do something to strike back at the company, and that something turned out to be demonstrating, or what they called “bannering,” in front of the plant. As Bambrick recalled:

We didn’t expect there to be a strike—we thought if they saw we were united and determined, they’d give in. So we found people whose yards we could stand in nearby the corporate office and the plant. Though it was cold and raining, there were over a hundred women there. We got all charged up and held another meeting in the park that same night. And we decided to banner the plant every week—on Thursday, since that was payday. The bannering meant a lot to the guys—they’d get their reduced paychecks, but they’d also see us out there with signs and banners and feel like we were beginning to fight back.

That was the last meeting held in the park, though. P-9 executive board member Floyd Lenoch came out and told them that thenceforth they could meet in the union hall.⁷

The support group demonstrated P-9 members’ and supporters’ capacity for self-organization. But members of the group say they would never have attained the level they ultimately reached without Ray Rogers and Corporate Campaign.

When Rogers and his partner Ed Allen first came to town in October 1984, they were amazed by what they saw. As they arrived at the site of a mass union meeting, they found several hundred women with signs and banners waiting outside to greet them. And rather than the anticipated fifty-odd union members, the hall was crammed with over three thousand P-9ers and family members.

At that meeting many members expressed two desires: to strike the company as soon as possible and to get out of the UFCW immediately. But Guyette and Rogers convinced them that a careful, strategic approach might be more effective. Ironically, Rogers argued that the problems between the local and the International could be ironed out, since he knew UFCW president Bill Wynn to be a reasonable man. Then Corporate Campaign’s partners went back to New York to work out a plan. When Rogers returned to another mass meeting in December, it was with a proposal to set the members and supporters loose on a particular set of targets:

We talked about tapping the power of ordinary people’s skills, imagination, and energies. And we talked about taking the support group and making it an activist organization. We set up an office and called it the War Room. Then we began weekly demonstrations. We knew we had to take the struggle beyond Austin, to expand it throughout the Midwest and even nationwide if necessary. Before the strike we had a large group of activists ready to do that, and we knew we’d have an even larger group if a strike took place.⁸

Rogers’ strong emphasis on mobilizing the membership has often been overlooked because of Corporate Campaign’s other, and seemingly more innovative, aspect: finding a company’s vulnerable “pressure point” and applying pressure to it. Rogers had been the author of the original corporate campaign when he worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in the 1970s. He began looking at ways to bring pressure against an employer when working on that union’s drive to organize the Farah company. But the full possibilities of what he (and soon everybody else who was interested in labor) called a corporate campaign were not revealed until Rogers applied his imagination to the target the union called “the country’s worst labor law violator,” J. P. Stevens & Co.

For 11 years, beginning in 1963, Stevens had responded to the union’s organizing drive by viciously bullying its workers and taking advantage of southern state governments’ hostility toward unions. In 1974 the Textile Workers Union won formal recognition through a National Labor Relations Board election. But that was only the beginning of a new phase of the struggle: The company continued its policy of intransigence, engaging in surface bargaining with the union (now the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, following a merger between the Textile Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers) with no intention of ever reaching an agreement.

The union protested against the company’s stalling tactics before the NLRB, and in 1977 an NLRB administrative law judge found that “the record as a whole indicates that [Stevens] approached these negotiations with all the tractability and openmindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta.” ACTWU kept after Stevens, continuing its high-profile boycott and legal campaign.⁹ But it also decided—at first reluctantly; then, when nothing else was working, with more enthusiasm—to let Rogers try his ideas.

The corporate campaign built upon the union’s attempt to paint J. P. Stevens as a pariah in the corporate world. The key to victory, it suggested, was to break corporate power down into manageable pieces, to identify the weak spots and pressure points where unions and other groups could focus their political and economic resources. Rogers, his co-workers, and allies forced an unprecedented number of resignations and dismissals of top officials at Stevens and at companies with which it shared board members, including Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., Avon Products, and New York Life Insurance Co. Additional pressure was also brought to bear against top officials of the Seaman’s Bank for Savings, Sperry Corporation, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. But, as Rogers still emphasizes, none of this involved mere embarrassment; rather, it was a test of strength, an exercise of union and coalition power versus corporate power.

In October 1979, under heavy pressure, Seaman’s Bank chairman E. Virgil Conway, who was a Stevens director, met with ACTWU president Murray Finley and said that he would do everything in his power to get meaningful negotiations going between Stevens and the union. At the time, union activists were holding Conway and his bank to account for Stevens’ actions: The bank had been prevented from opening a new branch for nearly a year because of a growing clamor over Seaman’s “redlining” practices, raised at New York State Banking Department hearings. Within the savings bank industry, Conway’s Stevens link was also becoming a hot issue, as politicians and consumer advocates pushed for legislation that would require election of mutual bank trustees by depositors. In addition, several hundred ministers had called for Conway’s resignation from a church pension board.

In the spring and summer of 1980, criticism of Sperry Corporation’s directorate interlock with Stevens had become so intense that Stevens finally began serious negotiations at the highest levels with ACTWU. When no settlement materialized, union members raised the Stevens issue on Sperry’s home turf: Nearly 700 union supporters, including the “real Norma Rae,” Crystal Lee Sutton, kept that company’s stockholders’ meeting tied up for five hours with a spirited dialogue, and 650,000 proxy votes were cast against the Stevens official who sought re-election to Sperry’s board.

But the real crunch came when the union went after Metropolitan Life Insurance, Stevens’ major creditor. The union challenged that insurer’s board by invoking a little-known New York law that gives policyholders the right to elect an insurance company’s board of directors. To bring such an election about, a small percentage of such policyholders must sign the petitions of an insurgent slate. When that happens, the enormous costs of the election must be paid by the company.

When Metropolitan chairman Richard Shinn heard that the union was organizing to make such an election a reality, he requested a meeting with union president Finley. At it he guaranteed an imminent Stevens settlement. Then, in the words of the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Shinn met with Whitney Stevens, the new chairman of Stevens. . . . Mr. Shinn says he applied “absolutely no pressure” on Mr. Stevens. . . . Without my ever having to say anything, [Stevens] realized that if in the course of good business dealings they could settle with the union, it would minimize our election problems.

Thereafter, there was a union and union contracts at 10 J. P. Stevens textile plants in the Carolinas and Alabama. (Seventy other plants remained unorganized, however.) Once they discovered the real story behind the settlement, union advocates and other observers heralded the corporate campaign as a new tool with incredible potential. Newsweek magazine announced, “The entire labor-management world was marvelling at Rogers’ work. . . . his tactics could revolutionize the labor movement.”¹⁰

But later campaigns had mixed results. Rogers left the Amalgamated and, along with his ACTWU co-worker Ed Allen, established a consulting firm, Corporate Campaign Inc. Initial clients included the Air Line Pilots Association, whose campaign against nonunion New York Air was cut short when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers went out on strike and reaped Reagan’s anti-union whirlwind. The Paperworkers’ union had CCI research and begin planning for a campaign against International Paper. It worked like gangbusters: The planning stage, during which the union packed the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting with angry members asking questions about company labor policies and began investigating the company’s environmental record, was sufficient to cause IP to back down from a set of extreme demands and agree to establish a more positive bargaining framework for the future. But easy victories bring their own sort of problems, and this one was so easy that few people remember it today.

Campbell Soup Co. accepted unique, three-way collective bargaining and grievance procedures (involving the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and a group of midwestern growers who supply the company with tomatoes and other vegetables) after its financial ties with Philadelphia National Bank, Equitable Life Assurance, and Prudential Life were threatened.¹¹ But an effort on behalf of the Machinists’ union’s beleaguered seven-month-old strike at Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co. in Rhode Island was aborted by the national union amid acrimonious charges, brought on, Rogers claims, by the national union’s fear of a mobilized membership. In that campaign, Rogers enlisted rank-and-file members to pressure the Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank, which served as a major lender to Brown & Sharpe and on whose board the B&S president served. He also got them to campaign against the re-election of U.S. Senator John Chafee, a relative of B&S chairman Henry D. Sharpe, Jr.¹²

Such was the experience and approach that Rogers and CCI brought with them to Austin. Rogers immediately got the members moving to publicize their issues. In January members braved below-zero temperatures to deliver 12,000 leaflets to Austin homes. That same month, a busload of spouses and members—actually made up overwhelmingly of support group members and retirees, rather than workers—accompanied Rogers and Allen to the Hormel stockholders’ meeting in Atlanta, the first ever held outside Austin.

Such actions at stockholders’ meetings, made possible by the purchase of small amounts of stock and the distribution of proxy votes among protesters, have been a common corporate campaign tactic. The tactic draws the attention of the media, and it demonstrates to the large investors that the company has a serious labor-relations problem on its hands. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, it allows the protesters a rare opportunity to have a face-to-face confrontation with corporate executives and directors. “The board members were all wearing their suits and other stockholders were dressed very nice, while we were there in jeans and sweatshirts,” recalled Jeannie Bambrick. “It made you feel so small.” But, said Vicky Guyette:

The meeting was the first time for me that I realized how rotten they treated us. It was the first time we’d experienced a confrontation with them, and they tried to prevent us from asking questions. No one wanted to be first—we held back until the first questions were asked. Then everyone’s hand went up, everybody had a question. Barbara Olsen got in a real back-and-forth with [Hormel CEO Richard] Knowlton. Afterwards, we were so happy we partied all the way home on the bus.¹³

The company, it should be pointed out, also made its points. Management demonstrated to the workers that it existed in a world that went far beyond the town of Austin, and that it was isolated from the problems that the workers experienced in the plant. And although the P-9ers raised serious questions about the conduct of the company, the directors showed that they could simply ignore such questions.

Over subsequent months, union members began speaking tours to meatpacking towns and major cities, explaining their cause. Workers would take a few days off from work, sometimes drive all day to speak or leaflet, then drive all night to get back home. They helped bring into being support committees in other towns, notably in Minneapolis-St. Paul and in Fremont. And they began a campaign of turning up the heat on the First Bank System.

First Bank was a key element in Corporate Campaign’s analysis of Hormel’s pressure points. A giant midwestern bank holding company with branches in five states, the bank shared three top policymakers with Hormel (including its own CEO, DeWalt Ankeny, and Hormel CEO Richard Knowlton) and in December 1984 held 16 percent of the meat-packer’s common stock. As early as 1926, Hormel had helped bail out the Austin National Bank, which later developed into the First Bank System. Board interlocks were continuous from that decade. And, more recently, First Bank Minneapolis had been one of three banks that made the 1982 construction of Hormel’s new Austin plant possible with $75 million in loan guarantees.¹⁴

Given such historic and current relations, Corporate Campaign reasoned that First Bank had the power to get Hormel to make a settlement. But aside from the Hormel Foundation, which held voting control over 45.6 percent of company stock along with a mandate “to keep the best interests of Austin and the surrounding community as its prime purpose,” there were few other pressure points.¹⁵ So direct pressure on the company remained vital.

•   •   •

The tabloid on injuries at Hormel was completed early in the spring of 1985 and distributed by the thousands. Local members had been organized by Rogers to fan out across the Midwest, distributing literature about Hormel door to door, at union meetings and plant gates, and outside branches of First Bank. “Legacy of Pain: Hormel’s Injured Workers in Austin” hit the company hard, and Hormel immediately responded with a series of public relations broadsides, alleging that the situation was really not that bad and blaming the lost time on “Minnesota’s liberal workers’ compensation laws [which] make it attractive to remain off work.”¹⁶

But the situation really was as bad as the Austin workers claimed. And “Legacy of Pain” showed them to be both exceptionally articulate and aroused about the injustices they had been dealt.

“We had one kid get stabbed in the leg in the kill area,” said 25-year veteran worker Ron Kraft, recounting one of the article’s many stories. “The guy next to him fell off a stand while heading hogs. The cement stand got all full of blood and he just slipped off. When he fell, his arm came back, and he stuck a knife 4 or 5 inches into the kid’s leg.

“The kid turned snow white. He was lying there on the ground—I never saw blood spurt out of anyone so fast. They wouldn’t touch him at the Austin hospital, so they had to rush him to Rochester. He nearly died on the way over there.”¹⁷

The workers themselves spoke of how knives, meat grinders, sausage stuffers, and other machines operated as efficiently on human limbs as on hog parts. Poor machine and plant design; speed enforced by the “chain,” or disassembly line; repeated motions; work in cold environments; and heavy lifting—all played a part in creating the enormously high annual injury rate. Workers also described the inadequacies of Minnesota’s workers’ compensation plan and the bizarre Qualified Rehabilitation Counselor system that assigns each worker out on disability a counselor, paid by the insurance companies, whose job it is to find suitable work for these crippled people. In other words, rather than reform the jobs that caused the injuries in the first place, Minnesota created another group of professionals who make a living off the workers’ injuries.

Among the most common injuries at the plant was “carpal tunnel syndrome,” a swelling of tissues in the wrist that leads to damaged hand and wrist nerves. The condition comes about as a result of repeating the same wrist motions over and over. First there is pain in the hands and wrists, then numbness and loss of circulation, particularly when you are at rest. If the motions that lead to the condition are stopped soon enough, the problem may subside; if not, medication followed by surgery to relieve pressure on the nerve may be required.

Elizabeth Anderson described how she began work at the plant in December 1982, boning hams in the area known as the “hog cut.” She worked up to speed, on a job that required her to cut off the shank meat, take out the bone, and trim excess fat from 92 hams per hour. Four months later, she began to experience pain and numbness in her wrists and arms. Unable to bid out of the department, she continued the repetitive work until she was forced to have surgery in November and December 1983. Afterward, she was assigned to as many as a dozen “rehabilitation jobs,” on which a person is supposed to be allowed time to heal. But almost every one of these seemed to involve lifting or exposure to heat or cold, subjecting her to further injury.

Finally, in July 1984, the company said that it had no further work for her and that, given her injury, there would be nothing for her in the future. By year’s end, she and her husband had decided to move to Wisconsin and look for work there: He went on ahead, and she stayed behind to allow her children to finish the school term. But in March, in spite of its earlier assurance that it had no further work for her, Hormel offered Anderson yet another job. Under Minnesota workers’ comp rules, this meant that she faced the choice of moving to be with her husband and losing all benefits or staying on and going through another round of what was likely to be unsuitable and injurious work at Hormel. Feeling herself to be handicapped for life, with only minimal strength in her arms, and outraged that the company would put her in such a position, she decided to leave.¹⁸

Hormel’s willingness to produce maimed workers and then discard them was another reason for Austin workers’ anger and militancy. And in its zeal to break the workers’ spirit, the company repeatedly demonstrated that all the workers’ concerns were connected: Hormel followed the October 1984 wage cut with a drastic cut in medical benefits, retroactive for several months, so that members were actually left owing the company money for benefits paid out in the past. “A lot of people never got that paid off,” said Carl Pontius, who would later join the local executive board. "That really teed everyone off and made people anxious to fight.”¹⁹

•   •   •

In April 1985, P-9 intensified its activities aimed at First Bank. Hundreds picketed bank branches, distributing leaflets that described the Hormel/First Bank connection and postcards to be sent to the bank urging that it either use its influence to restore the cut wages or sever ties with Hormel. (Such actions were referred to by the local as “bannering” rather than picketing, in order to avoid any suggestion of illegal secondary boycott activity.) The union encouraged supporters “not to put their money in places where it could be used against them,” and millions of dollars were withdrawn. A hundred fifty P-9 members, along with activists from citizens’ groups that had other complaints, attended the First Bank stockholders’ meeting in St. Paul, while others demonstrated outside.

Hormel workers dominated the microphones and the agenda of that meeting, which was cut off early to avoid further questions from them. As in previous campaigns of this kind, bank spokesmen claimed that they had no influence over Hormel’s corporate decisions, while Rogers and the union members claimed that the bank had the power to resolve the dispute. DeWalt Ankeny, bank president and a Hormel board member, said: “They attribute power to me that I don’t have,” adding that the bank was “monitoring what was going on” to determine if the union was engaged in an illegal secondary boycott.²⁰ And indeed, as would be demonstrated in time, there was a lot of “monitoring” going on.

Spring and early summer found the UFCW International as resolute as Hormel and the bank. Between Rogers’ two initial visits to Austin in October and December 1984, the local and Corporate Campaign had attempted to persuade the UFCW to support the Hormel campaign. Rogers, Allen, and Guyette had gone to Washington to meet with Executive Vice President Jay Foreman, Regional Director Wendell Olson, Packinghouse Division director Anderson, and President William Wynn. Not much was settled, and the UFCW officials agreed to have a further hearing of the issues at a meeting of officers from the several Hormel locals two months later in Chicago.

But before that meeting, Anderson began openly denouncing the local and its proposed corporate campaign in the press. And two Chicago sessions proved to be sham hearings: Though the local officers put Rogers and Allen through a long grilling, they took no vote on the campaign; and less than an hour after the second meeting, Anderson held a press conference, complete with a large stack of printed materials, to announce that the UFCW had decided not to back a campaign against Hormel, but instead to mount “a full-court press” against ConAgra/Armour, which he referred to as the worst corporate offender in meatpacking labor relations.²¹ A union press release announced the Packinghouse Committee’s support for the Armour campaign and recommendation that the UFCW “inform all local unions and the AFL-CIO that the union does not ‘endorse, support or authorize’ a corporate campaign or boycott against the George Hormel company.” It went on to say that P-9 had “chosen the wrong target at the wrong time,” since “we cannot raise the roof unless our foundation is solid.”²²

Anderson’s and the UFCW’s attacks on the local now gained momentum. A January press release describing one of the several arbitrator’s rulings that allowed Hormel’s wage and benefit reductions added: “a lack of understanding of the realities . . . can and often does bring about severe consequences for the membership.”²³ In March, UFCW president Wynn sent out a letter notifying all UFCW meatpacking locals that they should offer neither moral nor financial support for P-9’s “ill advised” campaign.²⁴ That same month Anderson publicly attacked the campaign as “bankrupt.” And the International organized a petition from local presidents at Hormel and Wilson plants, criticizing the local for trying to raise wages at Austin above the level of other plants, for spreading “anti-union venom,” and for pursuing “a suicide mission.”²⁵

Since October 1984, the local and Anderson had wrangled over when and under what conditions the Packinghouse Division director might come to Austin and address the members. In January, Anderson said that he was too busy to come and, as P-9 requested, clarify the UFCW’s position on the corporate campaign. P-9 members then, on January 18, approved a three-dollar-per-week per-person assessment to finance that campaign. In late February, International representatives appeared at the plant to hand out unsigned letters that asked why the International officers were being denied the right to meet with the members “without the presence of officials from corporate campaign [sic]" Guyette told reporters that the UFCW officials had also demanded that their safety be guaranteed.²⁶

On April 11 the UFCW announced that the local’s mid-January two-to-one vote to fund the campaign was invalid, since not enough prior notice had been given to the membership.²⁷ Then, on April 14, Anderson, accompanied by his assistants Al Vincent and John Mancuso, UFCW Region 13 leaders Wendell Olson and Joe Hansen, and Jay Foreman, came to Austin for what turned into a five-hour meeting with the membership.

In that meeting, Anderson recounted his past efforts to fight concessions, stating that he had seen 35 plants close and thousands of workers lose jobs in that fight. Members from such plants as Dubuque Packing and the “worker-owned” Rath Packing Co. in Waterloo, Iowa, had bitterly opposed the fight, wanting to allow pay cuts and thereby save their jobs. “We were called a no-good bunch of SOBs,” he said. “The news media said, The UFCW just closes plants up.’ It’s a little too late to be worrying about not taking cuts: The horse is out of the barn now.”

Spurred by plant closings, reorganization, and nonunion competition, the meatpacking industry as a whole had been very close to becoming nonunion, he said. To meet that challenge, the UFCW had taken up the strategy of trying to win a national rate at a lower level. He pointed out that after their wage cut, Austin workers were now earning less than the $9.00 rate established in “the chain settlement.” Fighting to restore the $10.69 rate would only encourage Hormel to subcontract at lower rates and to acquire more low-wage subsidiaries, as it had in the Kansas-based Dold Foods and Iowa’s FDL Foods.

P-9’s officers and members were unconvinced by the presentation and the approach of “stabilizing the bottom.” “You don’t fix the basement when the roof is leaking,” announced Guyette. “Workers at unorganized plants like Dold Foods want to know why they should join the union just to take a pay cut.” He pressed Anderson to admit that no contract wage rates had been negotiated upward since 1981. Many members shouted from the floor questions about Anderson’s and other officers’ salaries—why wasn’t Lewie taking a cut in his $70,000 annual wage?

Men and women came to floor microphones and asked earnestly why the International, if it wouldn’t support them, couldn’t at least leave them alone to fight with Hormel. “We believe in togetherness,” said one speaker, “but the way you see it, Local 9 is out in the cold and all the other locals are all right.”

“We can’t understand an International trying to force us to take less,” added Guyette. “In most places of the country you have to look for people willing to fight. You’ve got it here, and now you’re trying to defuse it.”

“We’re not on your backs,” Anderson responded. “You can proceed in your direction, but if you go outside of your local and try to drag others into it, that’s another story.”²⁸

But in succeeding months, the International stayed on the local’s back. In May, Wynn sent each member of the local a letter strongly critical of local leaders and the corporate campaign; large sections of it were reproduced in the Austin daily newspaper.²⁹ A group of local dissidents were given aid and legitimacy far beyond their numbers: In June these “P-10ers” somehow gathered 560 names on a petition to force a second vote on accepting the $9.00 and $10.00 “chain settlement.” “It appears that a very large percentage of the membership is growing weary of the direction that has been taking place,” Anderson told the Rochester Post-Bulletin on the eve of the vote.³⁰ But the vote to continue the campaign was overwhelming—722 to 178—as was the second vote on the three-dollar-per-member assessment to fund the corporate campaign.³¹

Anderson and the International were far from done. Nevertheless, as the days moved toward the expiration of the contract that had allowed the 23 percent wage cut, P-9 members seemed to long for a showdown.

The union and company met for the first negotiating session on June 25, 1985, though both sides knew that the contract would expire in August.³² P-9 was usually represented by nine members of the local’s executive board—Guyette, Winkels, Lynn Huston, Skinny Weis, Floyd Lenoch, Jim Retterath, Keith Judd, Kenny Hagen, and Audrey Newman—plus bargaining committee chairman Dave Ring and attorney Ron Rollins; Hormel generally sent a 10-member team, led by Austin plant personnel manager Bill Swanson and including staff attorney James Cavanaugh.

P-9 presented its proposal at the second meeting, held on July 2. Most significantly, this attempted to reinstitute an incentive plan the local had given up in 1978; in grievance hearings, to again consider all past practices as binding—a right that had been limited under the expiring contract; to ensure that all transfers would be on the basis of seniority; to provide a means of expediting arbitration; to limit subcontracting of union work; to allow employees to honor any picket line at their plant; to conduct an ergonomic study of safety problems at the plant; and to raise the wage rate to $12.50, complimented by pay for overtime and lump-sum reimbursements for the previous wage and benefit cuts. The union also proposed a right to strike over safety, work standards, and unresolved grievances—three major irritants—during the life of the contract.³³

“We’d had our experiment in trusting the company in 1978,” Guyette told me. “Now we wanted a document that it didn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to understand.”³⁴

On July 17, Hormel presented its first offer. The company proposed to make seniority secondary to consideration of “ability to perform all the work operations” in case of vacancies or promotions, and it claimed the absolute right to assign all overtime, to abolish or alter jobs, and to transfer or subcontract work. It restricted the grievance and arbitrations system. It proposed abolition of the existing 52-week notice before any layoff, substituting a very limited three-month notice of plant closing. It allowed management to transfer workers throughout the plant on an involuntary basis. It gave the company the right to hire temporary workers without paying them benefits or allowing them to accumulate seniority. It eliminated consideration of any past practices in grievances and banned all “strikes, handbilling, boycotts or [attempts to] coerce or restrain the company, [or] any business affiliated with the company.” And it restricted overtime and holiday pay. Initially, Hormel did not address the issue of wages.³⁵

The company presented a second proposal on July 31. It altered the first proposal hardly at all, but an attached wage classification scheme began to suggest where Hormel wanted to go with wages.³⁶ Finally, on August 3, in the presence of federal mediator Hank Bell, Hormel negotiators announced that the company was seeking a $10.00 base rate, a freeze of current workers’ wages at that rate, plus a two-tier wage scheme that would pay new hires $8.00 at the beginning and $9.00 by the end of the three-year agreement. Nowhere were safety issues addressed, nor was the company willing to consider a contract expiration date that would allow Austin to get in sync with contracts at the other plants.

Bell, who had been called in to help move negotiations along, observed at that meeting that “the parties are not settling on an approach.” Indeed they weren’t. And in spite of the mediator’s urging on August 5 and 6 (and his frequent warnings to the local about the danger of striking), little agreement was ever achieved.

The 15th negotiating session was held on August 7, and immediately afterward Guyette called the company’s employment manager, William Swanson, to give him the required 48-hour strike notice. Swanson said he was surprised and noted that the company had yet to give the union its final proposal. It finally did so on August 8—one day before the strike deadline.³⁷

Hormel’s final proposal improved the seniority clause but continued to limit seniority rights—language elsewhere allowed the company free reign to transfer workers and to assign regular and overtime work and restricted job-bidding rights. Most other provisions that the union had found objectionable remained, with only slight revision.³⁸

Both sides treated the final session on August 10 as a post-mortem. Swanson again and again observed that the company “believes it has fulfilled the obligation to bargain in good faith” and that “negotiations are at an impasse.” Former local president Floyd Lenoch announced, “This is the worst example of negotiating I’ve seen, and I’ve seen plenty.”³⁹

The negotiating committee unanimously recommended rejection of the Hormel proposal to the membership. And on August 14, 93 percent of P-9 members voted against it.

“Bargaining never really had a chance,” union attorney Ron Rollins reflected several months later. Noting that in 1984 the company had replaced its old-line Minneapolis legal counsel with the Milwaukee firm of Krukowski, Chaet, Beck & Loomis, which was building a reputation as a union-buster, and that the local had retained Corporate Campaign Inc., he said that “the action just wasn’t at the bargaining table.”

“That was reinforced at the first bargaining meeting,” he continued. “It appeared that the company had deliberately sent a bargaining committee made up of distinctly low-level officials from the Austin plant, though it was clear that important issues, like money, could not be decided by Austin plant officials. Although the words were neutral, it looked like a committee distinctly without authority.” (Indeed, Hormel Vice President for Human Relations David Larson, the company’s chief labor negotiator, absented himself early on from most meetings.) Rollins’ opinion was that “the company’s goal was to lay out a proposal that it would implement at impasse.”⁴⁰

Rollins was not alone in feeling pessimistic about negotiations. In a June 17 memo, Police Chief Don Hoffman advised the mayor that he had already contacted over seven big-city police chiefs and experts on “labor unrest” across the country, all of whom “are eager to provide us with their knowledge and experience.” By July Hoffman was holding regular meetings with officials of the State Patrol, the union, and the Chamber of Commerce about the impending strike, and, according to another memo, police “continually meet with Corporate officers and also with [Hormel security chief] Ken Carlson and Gary Baker who is their security consultant.”⁴¹

At midnight on August 16, a rowdy picket of 400 people lined the street across from the plant’s main gate. Chants of “We’re gonna win! We’re gonna win! gave way to a countdown of the last 10 seconds before the contract’s expiration, followed by cheers and shouts of exultation.

“Everybody’s emotions were running very high that night,” recalled support committee member Carole Apold.

Some of the executive board members had gone into the plant to make sure that everybody was out: One of the main things I remember was Jim Guyette walking out and giving us the thumbs up as the security men closed the gate behind him.

The next day, Danny Blazer told me that he heard horns honking and people chanting “P-9 Proud” all the way over at his house, which is about a mile from the plant. In fact, we woke him up, and he got out of bed to see what was going on. Everybody who was out there just had a very strong feeling that we were doing what needed to be done.⁴²