A-Infos (en) US, Anarchist WSA* - renewd Ideas & Actions - 25th Anniversary of the Hormel Strike

Some 25 years ago, the workers at the Austin, Minnesota plant of the Hormel Corp. embarked 
on a long and brave fight. A fight which was not only right but fought âfrom belowâ. This 
fight and the rank-and-file efforts to wage and control the struggle captivated the 
attention of all militant workers. ---- In the Workers Solidarity Allianceâs print version 
of ideas & action Steve Boyce, Jake Edwards and Tom Wetzel penned an excellent, article, 
âSlaughterhouse Fight: A Look at the Hormel Strikeâ In recognition of the 25th Anniversary 
of the struggle, we are re-publishing the article below. ---- The Hormel strike came at a 
time of continued defeats for the American working class. Starting in the late 1970âs with 
de-industrialization, the Chrysler bailout and the continuous string of concessionary 
bargaining (collective begging), the attacks on the working class went unabated.

The Hormel strike, as with the Phelps-Dodge copper miners strike a few years earlier, were 
workplace struggles where the whole community was involved. It was a struggle âat the 
point of productionâ and a social struggle engaged by the citizenry of their respective 
communities. They were struggles which started out in the confines of their respective 
trade unions. Yet as those unions failed the workers and the communities, in an effort to 
win their fights, both the Hormel and Phelps-Dodge workers began to self-organize.

The story of the Hormel strike is a story of struggle: against an employer who was out to 
take everything they could from the workersâ.and against a compliant union which engaged 
in a policy of âstrategic retreatâ.

From our vantage point, as class struggle anarchists, the analysis of the Hormel strike, 
and that of the trade union movement, rings as clear today as it did some 20 years ago.

The authorsâ conclusion is worth emphasizing:

âThe history of the Hormel struggle demonstrates once again how the present top-down union 
Internationals are bound to be in conflict with the rank and file who want control over 
their own movement and militant solidarity against the employers. To develop an effective 
challenge to the employing class and unionism self-managed by the rank and file, it is 
going to be necessary to develop new organization. â..

âA workers movement guided by the principles of rank-and-file democracy, worker 
solidarity, and militant struggle against the employing class is bound to develop new 
forms of organization, independent of the rotting corpse of American business unionism. 
The top-down structure of the AFL-CIO-type unions is an albatross around the neck of the 
American workforce. What is needed is a new form of organization in which the rank and 
file directly manage the struggle and the local organizations are linked together in 
horizontal, worker-to-worker solidarity.â

Slaughterhouse Fight: A Look at the Hormel Strike

by Steve Boyce, Jake Edwards and Tom Wetzel

When the airline unions and the AFL-CIO let the air controllers go down to defeat, the 
message to the employing class was, âYou can do what you want; we wonât organize a 
fighting solidarity.â

The employersâ concessions drive soon became an epidemic. Yet there have been a number of 
militant, if isolated, struggles by workers who have put up a strong resistance. They have 
often had to fight against the union hierarchy as well as the employer. The Watsonville 
cannery strike is one of these struggles, the Hormel strike is another.

Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), made up of workers at 
Hormelâs main plant at Austin, Minnesota, has attempted to break out of isolation in 
several ways: a âCorporate Campaignâ that tried to bring consumer pressure against 
Hormelâs main bank, a consumer boycott of Hormel meat products, and by roving pickets sent 
to other Hormel plants.

In their union meetings and rallies, in their travels to other unions around the country, 
the message of the Austin meatpackers is that itâs time to re-orient the labor movement, 
itâs time for a real fight against employer arrogance. In their collective defiance of the 
heads of the UFCW International Union, the Hormel strikers have raised the question, Who 
shall run the labor movement, the careerist, top-down hierarchy of the AFL-CIO-type 
unions, or the rank and file whose lives are directly affected?

As of June [1986], P-9ers were claiming that only about 700-to-800 people were working in 
the Austin plant; the company, on the other hand, claims it now has 1,050 people working. 
Over 1,500 had been employed there before the strike. But the company claims it can run 
the plant with only 1,050 people. The 400 former P-9 members who returned to work after 
Hormel restarted production in January were particularly damaging to the strike since they 
had skills and experience needed to bring production back to normal levels.

Hormel recently announced that its profits were down 25.7% from the second quarter of last 
year, due to the strike. Nonetheless, theyâre still making money and hundreds of P-9 
defectors and new hires continue to labor in the Austin plant on the companyâs terms.

After all the media attention and the hundreds who have attended the support rallies, 
whatâs left is the remnants of a proud local union fighting a lonely battle against 
company greed and AFL-CIO betrayal. After a year-long corporate campaign and ten months on 
strike, it wasnât supposed to end this way.

The Packinghouse Division of the UFCW was the inheritor of the traditions of the CIO 
United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWA) and the AFL Amalgamated Meatcutters Union. The 
labor struggle in the meatpacking industry has faced some of the most brutal, dangerous, 
racist and unsanitary conditions in American industry. What was achieved, through several 
decades of struggle, were improved conditions and a national wage standard adhered to by 
all producers. The national standard was necessary to prevent wages from being undercut by 
competition from low-wage producers. The militant traditions and post-World War II 
prosperity had made these improvements possible.

By 1983 the eroded vestiges of this reality had collapsed. (See sidebar below, âStrategy 
of Appeasementâ.) The rule of thumb in meatpacking today is that each company will squeeze 
or discard the UFCW for the lowest wages and the worst conditions it can get.

More Injuries, Lower Wages

The workers of Hormelâs Austin operations were first pressured to give concessions in the 
1978 contract, which included a rigorous âno-strikeâ clause. At that time local P-9 was 
being led by a more pro-company case of officials, who decided to breakaway from the 
Hormel master contract in exchange for a supposed guarantee that there would be no more 
cuts at Austin. The $20 million in concessions helped to finance Hormelâs new $100 million 
plant in Austin.

Only 1,750 workers were employed in the new plant when it opened in 1982 â less than half 
as many as worked in the old plant. Some of the new technology had inadequate safety 
features â like automatic back saws with no safety guards. The plant seemed to be designed 
with little thought for the people who be working there. Instead of work stands that could 
be adjusted to the workerâs height, as in the old plant, the new plant had fixed work 
stations. Management was talking about getting a 20% increase in productivity out of the 
new facility. As one commentator has described it:

Everyoneâs work was changed, sped up, pressured, and tied to external pacing and new 
standards. Ham-boners, for instance, were required to do 93 an hour. The rate was so fast 
that they could only sharpen their knives on the upswing, before plunging downward into 
another ham.

(âThe Safety Issue in the Hormel Strike,â Pete Rachleff, Labor Notes #88.)

The new plant experienced a 120% increase in worker injuries.

In 1982 the UFCWâs Lewie Anderson negotiated a new national contract for the Hormel 
plants. The summary of the contract provided by the International said that the agreement 
continued the policy of wages being adjusted to the national standard and prohibited wage 
reductions. It was on that understanding that the contract was ratified by Local P-9.

But in the fall of â83, Hormel decided to take advantage of the concessions fever then 
sweeping the industry and announced that it was lowering wages in pursuit of the UFCWâs 
ânational standardâ which had already become a pathetic joke. Hormel was not motivated by 
financial losses since it was â and remains â highly profitable.

What the surprised membership of P-9 discovered, when they got a copy of the contract from 
the International, was that the alleged provision prohibiting wage reductions was missing. 
What had been signed by the UFCW was not what had been sold to the localâs members. People 
were not happy. December of that year saw a reform slate elected for local office, 
including a new president, Jim Guyette, who ran on a platform of no wage concessions.

The 1982 master contract for the Hormel plants had contained a clause that permitted 
re-opening the contract in 1984, before the contractâs expiration in September 1985. The 
UFCW had justified this as a means of regaining lost ground. But in 1984 the International 
proposed a $1.69 per hour wage cut for Hormel workers outside Austin (from $10.69 to $9 
per hour).

Lewie Anderson, UFCW vice-president and head of the Packinghouse Division, had negotiated 
the agreement that was falsely presented to P-9 as protection against wage cuts. This time 
he conceded that it was going to be difficult to sell wage cuts to the Austin workers 
given the profitability of the company. From the public record, it seems that brother 
Anderson does not engage in the truth, but this time he was right on the mark. It was not 
going to be easy selling this deal.

Wages were cut in Austin from $10.69 to $8.25 per hour on October 8, 1984.Ironically, the 
Austin local had broken earlier â under the previous local leadership â with the rest of 
the Hormel plants to negotiate separately.At that time they had gotten a better deal than 
everybody else. Now the new leaders of P-9 were faced with having the lowest wages and yet 
they could no longer count on the united strength of negotiating with the other Hormel locals.

Enter Ray Rogers

The immediate response to the wage reduction was a call for strike action â against the 
contract, the company and anybody else who was trying to gut their wages. Knowing that 
help from the UFCW would be non-existent, Guyette called a New York public relations firm 
to ask for help in getting the localâs message across. They put him in touch with Ray 
Rogers and Corporate Campaign, Inc.

Ray Rogers is a man with a mission and that mission is to reshape the labor movement, for 
a price. Rogers is not a wealthy man but he is a businessman and his business is providing 
local unions with an alternative to going on strike. He came to Austin and sold Guyette â 
and then the membership â on a campaign to restore to P-9 what Hormel and the UFCW had 
taken away. âStrikes are obsolete,â he told them. âWhat you have to do is to take your 
power to the doorsteps of power.â Ray Rogers talks fast, in his thick Boston accent, and 
is prone to a cheerleading style, as in âGive me a âWâ, give me an âIâ, give me an âNâ; 
Whatâs that spell? Whatâs that spell?â Rogers told them again and again that they had the 
power and he would help them use it. P-9 listened, and believed, and did not strike.

What P-9 members got was a $3 per week assessment to pay for a $40,000 deal with Corporate 
Campaign, Inc. Rogers and his staff of ten make $425 a week with year-end bonuses of 
$1,000 (if business is good). The model for Corporate Campaign is Rogersâ campaign for the 
Amalgamated Clother and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) against J.P. Stevens, which achieved 
union recognition against a notoriously nonunion Southern employer.

Rogers left ACTWU in 1981 and, with a partner, launched CorporateCampaign, Inc. as his own 
business. Since then his track record has been mixed â some wins, some losses but nothing 
approaching the publicity of the J.P. Stevens campaign. For Rogers P-9 provided the 
opportunity of another J.P. Stevens and Corporate Campaign threw themselves into this like 
there was no tomorrow. Protest plans for Hormelâs annual shareholders meeting panicked the 
executives into moving the meeting to Atlanta.

Research into Hormelâs stock ties and board of directors had turned up First Bank. One of 
the upper Midwestâs financial giants, the St. Paul-based bank looked like the ideal 
location of the âdoorsteps of power.â First Bank was descended upon with pickets at 
branches in three states and protesters at their shareholders meeting. Enormous quantities 
of literature were produced â from leaflets to newspapers â and sent throughout Minnesota 
and beyond. Teams of volunteers went door to door canvassing in the suburbs of Minneapolis 
and St. Paul. The plan was to get individuals, and unions and other institutions, to 
withdraw their funds and bombard First Bank with demands that the wage cuts at Hormel be 
rescinded.

It didnât work. First Bank blandly denied that it had anything to do with management 
decisions at Hormel.

The corporate campaign failed because it was based on flawed assumptions. The assumption 
is that workers should appeal to âpublic opinionâ rather than to solidarity from other 
workers. This is done by trying to show how the targeted employer is especially unfair to 
its workforce. At best this could only work to bring a particularly nasty employer up to 
currently prevailing level of exploitation and arrogance among employers. In the case of 
the J.P. Stevens campaign, Rogersâ campaign dwelled upon the fact that Stevens had more 
violations of labor laws than anyone else.

But in the current climate of employer aggression, Hormel is just following the present 
trend, justified among business leaders as a âbattle to become more competitive.â The 
leaders of Continental, Iowa Beef Processors, the Chicago Tribune and Phelps-Dodge would 
certainly not say that Hormel is particularlyâunfairâ to its workers. To the employing 
class, Hormelâs callousness and arrogance are just âsmart business practices.â

Since the AFL-CIO heads see corporate campaigns as a way to avoid strikes, they actually 
favor them, as the J.P. Stevens campaign demonstrates. What the UFCW International and 
AFL-CIO tops dislike in this case is not the corporate campaign in itself, but the fact 
that a gutsy local union is charting its own course independent of the International.

The corporate campaign didnât work because it didnât stop Hormel from continuing to make 
money from packaging meat. To do that it was necessary to stop production.

Within the local a core of dissenters publicly attacked Rogers and Guyette and from UFCW 
Region 13 headquarters came veiled threats off-putting P-9 into receivership. On National 
Public Radio Lewie Anderson said that the problem now at Hormel was that the workers made 
too much money and this would make the company unprofitable and lead to loss of jobs. The 
NPR reporter commented that he sounded very much like a company spokesman.

As long as the company still recognized the UFCW and kept wages in the $8 per hour range, 
nobody at the International really cared.

Among those who did care, support was growing as the contract expiration drew near. In the 
Twin Cities area an informal group of local union officials, rank and file activists, 
sympathetic academics, revolutionary veterans of the â30s and assorted leftists had become 
the Metro Support Committee. This committee then initiated the National Rank and File 
Against Concessions (NRFAC) to give P-9 leaders a national platform.

On the company side, active preparations were underway for a strike.P-9âs roving pickets 
against First Bank were being monitored and photographed for future legal action against 
the local. The line producing Hormelâs most popular new product â hot dogs stuffed with 
chili â was dismantled and moved to Houston. $80,000 worth of barbed wire was purchased 
and a marketing agreement signed with FDL Foods in Iowa. This last step was the most 
significant in that it would prevent Hormel from shortages of product should the Austin 
plant be shut down.

The shut down came on August 7th and stretched through the fall and into winter. The Metro 
Support Committee organized caravans bringing tons of food to Austin, as did Region 13 of 
the UFCW. While receiving strike pay of $40 from the International and $25 from Region 13, 
money was running low in Austin and striking families were facing a grim Christmas.

Local P-9 had wanted to restore the old $10.69 per hour standard wage. The differential in 
pay between what P-9 wanted and what Hormel offered had been steadily narrowed by 
arbitratorsâ rulings before the strike and mediators proposals after the strike began. The 
final company offer was for $10 per hour for the current workforce. Though material had 
been published on the safety problems in Hormelâs new plant, Corporate Campaignâs 
overwhelming emphasis had been on the money issue â a profitable company cutting wages. 
They suddenly had to scramble to explain that there was a lot more at stake than 69 cents.

The proposed contract gave Hormel a free hand as far as work rules went and did cut wages 
for new hires to $8 per hour (a âtwo-tierâ system). Region 13 director Joe Hansen made it 
clear in his announcement that this was the best deal P-9 would get and that the UFCW 
would conduct a mail ballot.Guyette and 150 strikers shouted him down and announced that 
they would take their own vote. The proposed contract was defeated by a small majority in 
both ballots.

Hormel had already announced that a defeat of this proposal would trigger the opening of 
the plan with scabs and as many P-9 members as were willing to cross picket lines. This 
eventuality had never really been confronted or planned for by local leaders. Some 
believed that Hormel could not bring in a large number of scabs into such a small 
community (population 22,000). Others thought Rogers would launch a new corporate campaign 
targeting fast food restaurants or other major customers of Hormel. Rogers began to 
threaten mass civil disobedience and the media started to call him the Martin Luther King 
of the labor movement. The UFCW replied by calling him the Ayatollah of Austin. William 
Wynn â the president of the UFCW International â public ally denounced Guyette, accusing 
him of leading P-9 on a suicide mission and appealed to the local membership to repudiate 
the strike and go back to work.

Hormel attempted to re-open the plant in January. The day the plant opened there was no 
mass civil disobedience or publicity campaigns. Instead there were hundreds of union men 
and women blocking the gates and the scabs did not pass that day or the next. By the end 
of the week the National Guard was in place and the area around the plant was placed under 
martial law.

Roving Pickets

P-9 then sent out roving pickets to spread the strike and shut down production at the 
other plants in the Hormel chain. Hormel was particularly vulnerable to this strategy 
since it is not a conglomerate that can bleed off profits from one industrial division to 
prop up another during a strike. All that Hormel does is package meat and it has been 
doing this very profitably from 1891 to the present.

On January 25th the Hormel plant at Ottumwa, Iowa was shut down by a march of hundreds of 
pickets to the gates. Hormel retaliated by firing 478 workers who refused to cross the 
picket lines. The plant normally employs 800 workers. With a large part of the workforce 
locked out, there was little production at the Ottumwa plant. On February 8th a rally of 
some 2,000 unionists, their families and supporters was held in Ottumwa. Support in the 
community is fairly strong. The mayor of the town told the rally, âYouâve got the right 
not to cross that picket line.â Another mass rally in support of the Ottumwa workers took 
place on May 10th, including hundreds of P-9 members bused in from Austin.

The shop stewards in the Ottumwa plant had been particularly instrumental in getting 
people to refuse to cross the picket lines set up by the workers from Austin. Instead of 
backing the fired shop stewards, the UFCW has lately been organizing elections of new shop 
stewards among the Ottumwa workers who werenât fire.

On February 16th about 200 pickets from P-9 showed up at the FDL Foods plant in Dubuque. 
The local union president, Mel Maas, stood at the plant gates, along with representatives 
from the UFCW International,telling workers this was not a sanctioned picket and that they 
should go to work. Nonetheless, about half of the 900 workers on the morning shift were 
persuaded to stay out.

The roving pickets had less success at the other Hormel plants. Only about 65 workers 
stayed out when pickets showed up at the Fremont,Nebraska plant. When the pickets arrived 
at the Hormel operation in Atlanta, they discovered that the UFCW had only a minimal 
organizing effort going on. The UFCW only held union meetings every four months and the 
location of the meetings was 40 miles from the plant.

Local P-9 had originally considered sending out pickets to other plants in October. They 
waited until January because they were trying to get the Internationalâs sanction for the 
roving pickets. They made a deal with William Wynn, who pledged to approve the roving 
pickets if negotiations with Hormel failed.

Though the negotiations did eventually raise the wage offer to $10 per hour, the companyâs 
âfinal offerâ in January still contained a lot of givebacks that would essentially give 
management the right to do anything it wanted in the plant, and wipe out all the past 
practices and procedures (e.g. seniority rights) that defended workers against arbitrary 
management power. But when P-9 members rejected this contract in January, Wynn reneged on 
his pledge and refused to sanction roving pickets. His pledge was exposed as a dishonest 
stalling tactic.

On February 15th 3,000 strike supporters from unions throughout the midwest marched in the 
streets of Austin and rallied at the high school. Speaker after speaker from National Rank 
and File Against Concessions pledged undying support for a fight to the end. The 
pro-strike community is a minority in Austin but they were there in force â from infants 
to old men. Workers from all industries were there, carrying signs, union banners and the 
American flag. Even boring speeches were interrupted by standing ovations again and again.

Everywhere in that crowded auditorium you could feel it, that we all need something, 
something different, something new from the labor movement, and maybe this is where it 
will start. Everyone wants to believe it. After the rally people filed out, pushing their 
way past legions of Trotskyists selling newspapers, pamphlets, and discussion bulletins.

Shortly afterwards in Bal Harbor, Florida, the AFL-CIO Executive Committee refused to hear 
an appeal by Rogers and Guyette for and AFL-CIO endorsed boycott of Hormel products. 
Later, William Wynn and Lane Kirkland stood cheek to jowl for the press while Wynn 
denounces the âfascist tacticsâ of P-9. Kirkland lets it be known that from now on the AFL 
will try to intervene in disputes between Internationals and insurgent locals. The 
official disapproval sent a chill wind through the leftwing cheerleaders who had been 
hailing P-9 and the corporate campaign.

Bill Montross of the UFCWâs research department was able to denounce the strike in the 
pages of In These Times (âLocal P-9 Is Leading Mass Suicideâ, 2/26), the Guardian 
(âDissidence Isnât Always Progressive,â 2/19), and Labor Notes (âUFCW International Led 
Fight Against Concessionsâ, April). Montrossâs hatchet job, prepared by leftists at the 
Internationalâs headquarters, tried to portray the UFCW as the defender of âprogressiveâ 
unionism while P-9 was denounced for âisolation, individualism, and division.â In the 
Internationalâs eyes,âsolidarityâ means obedience to their orders, even if those orders 
ban actual solidarity.

That this could even be considered a matter of serious debate was a disgrace. But the 
Communist Party registered the leftist retreat the earliest and clearest: âThe local 
leadershipâs attacks on the leadership of the UFCW has played into the hands of the 
corporationsâ union busting strategy and will be used to split and divide other locals and 
be used as ammunition against the union in organizing drivesââ (Daily World, 2/6). In 
other words, the union apparatus must be preserved, even against the workers themselves.

On Saturday, April 12th, another 3,000-strong rally assembled in Austin, with supporters 
from all over the country. The rally was fired up by the fact that 400 strikers and 
supporters had shut the plant down for several hours on Friday, before being dispersed by 
riot cops.

At the meeting before the Friday picketing, non-violence was stressed as it has been 
throughout the strike. The plan had been to block the roads leading to the plant with 
circles of cars. Several hundred strikers amassed at the main gate, chanting, hurling 
insults at the cops. The strikers had the advantage of numbers. But when the cops finally 
began to tow cars, no effort was made to stop them. Having broken through the protective 
circle of vehicles, the cops moved in to arrest picketers.

Rogersâ strategy towards the strike has been to push non-violentâcivil disobedience,â 
rather like Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement or the anti-nuclear protesters 
who sit down in front of nuclear plants with the intention of getting arrested. Rogers 
preaches non-violence because he thinks the heart of the struggle is winning support for 
the Hormel strikers in the eyes of âpublic opinion.â But many of those in this amorphous 
âpublicâ are landlords, small store owners, politicians, and others whose class interests 
are not the same as meatpacking workers. Meanwhile, if Hormel can successfully recruit and 
train a scab workforce, the company has no reason to listen to strikersâ demands. And 
seeing the scabs take their jobs is demoralizing for the strikers.

The problem with âcivil disobedienceâ is its pacifism, which leaves the bossesâ law and 
order effectively unchallenged. It takes force to stop scabs; it canât be done by moral 
appeals to public opinion.

âCDâ only produces arrests, it does not produce any power for the workers. Yet direct 
action by workers to defend their picket lines against the job-stealing of the scabs is 
perfectly legitimate, no matter what capitalist legality may say about it.

Rogers argued that if the strikers didnât practice non-violence, the National Guard would 
be brought back in. But Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Governor Perpich had removed the 
National Guard in February only after hundreds of supporters from other unions had been 
mobilized to support the strikers in Austin. The honorable governor was worried about the 
political fallout from a major confrontation between the Guard and large groups of strike 
supporters.

Another twist in Rogersâ emphasis upon âpublic opinionâ is the consumer boycott of Hormel 
products. But the track record of consumer boycotts in this country is not very encouraging.

If transport workers and retail clerks refused to handle Hormel products,that would be a 
more effective form of boycott. Most unionized supermarket clerks belong to the UFCW. But 
instead of asking retail clerks to refuse to handle Hormel products, the International 
demanded unconditional surrender by P-9.

Despite their sincere effort to be peaceful and avoid violence, local P-9 has been 
subjected to physical violence from the cops and National Guard and many have been 
arrested. Meanwhile, the Twin Cities dailies describe P-9 as ârigidâ and âinflexible.â

After the attempt to close the plant on April 11th, Rogers was indicted under the 
Minnesota Criminal Syndicalism law, the first time that statute has been invoked in 
decades. This law, which bans advocacy of sabotage or industrial violence to affect social 
change, was passed in 1917 for the purpose of outlawing the Industrial Workers of the 
World. The IWW had led a major strike of mine workers on the Messabi iron ore range in 
Minnesota in 1916.

After announcing in March that it was ending sanction for P-9âs strike the UFCW 
International sent a letter to P-9 members cutting off strike benefits for strikers who 
refuse to go back to work on Hormelâs terms. The UFCW mailing included a form letter, 
addressed to Hormelâs personnel manager, which states that the applicant is willing to 
take any job unconditionally.

Bring Back the Sit-Down Strike?

The weakness of P-9âs position has been its inability to close down operations at the 
Austin plant. When Hormel began production in January, it would have been possible to 
break into the plant and carry out a sit-down strike. At that point the strikersâ numbers 
and enthusiasm were at a peak, and the âforces of orderâ could have been taken by surprise.

A sit-down strike would have been the most effective way to shut down production and force 
Hormel to take the strikersâ concerns seriously. When strikers are outside on picket 
lines, they are an easier target for cop violence and management has a free hand inside 
the plant. On the other hand, when workers are in possession of the plant, the scabs canât 
be brought in to carry on production. The strikers would be holding the $100 million plant 
hostage. Management would think twice before ordering a cop assault to clear the plant of 
sit-down strikers.

A sit-down strike was how local P-9 was organized originally back in 1933. Discontented 
workers in the hog kill department got together with with an experienced Wobbly (IWW) 
organizer, named Frank Ellis, who was working as a foreman in another department. This led 
to the formation of the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW). Ellis was one of a number 
of IWW butchers who migrated around the midwest from job to job in those days.

After the IUAW went on strike against Hormel in â33, the company attempted to start up a 
sheep kill with scabs. At that point,

Four hundred men, many of them armed with clubs, sticks and rocks, crashed through the 
plant entrance, shattering the glass doors and sweeping the guards before them. The 
strikers quickly ran throughout the plant to chase out non-union workers. Oneâgroup 
crashed through the doors of a conference room where Jay Hormel and five company 
executives were meeting and declared âWeâretaking possession. So move out!â (Larry 
Engelmann, âWe Were the Poor â The Hormel Strike of 1933,â Labor History, Fall, 1974.)

Though Minnesotaâs Farmer-Labor Party governor at the time, Floyd Olson, denounced the 
strikersâ âillegal possession of the plant,â the company threw in the towel after four 
days of worker occupation of the plant. The IUAW went on to become a major center for 
organizing meatpacking plants in the upper midwest in the â30s. It eventually became part 
of the United Packinghouse Workers Union of the CIO.

The heads of the AFL-CIO unions are definitely opposed to the sit-down tactic. When the 
state outlaws the most effective forms of worker action, such as sit-down strikes and 
refusing to handle scab goods,the union heads simply go along with this because they try 
to avoid any action that may put their organization at risk or threaten to disrupt their 
long-standing relationships with management and government leaders. Workersâ first concern 
may be their on-the-job situation but the International union heads do not share those 
conditions and their first concern is the survival of the union as a bureaucratic institution.

Rogers and his supporters in local P-9 preached âcivil disobedienceâyet a plant occupation 
would have been the most effective form of âdisobedience.â A plant occupation may be 
illegal, but it is also illegal to block streets with cars. And obviously Rogersâ strategy 
did not avoid arrests or police violence.

A New Union in the Meatpacking Industry?

On April 14th and 15th the UFCW International held hearings on its proposal to place local 
P-9 in trusteeship. The rationale for the trusteeship was local P-9âs refusal of the 
Internationalâs order to end the strike. The International failed to provide documents and 
witnesses by local P-9, which denounced the proceedings as a âshamâ and a âfarce.â

On May 9th, the Executive Board of the UFCW International ordered a trusteeship for local 
P-9, with the Region 13 director Joe Hansen appointed as the Internationalâs dictator in 
Austin. The UFCWâs trusteeship was upheld by federal District Court judge Edward Devitt on 
June 2nd and the UFCW then changed the locks on the unionâs offices, seized all files and 
funds, and ousted the elected leadership. Even before the trusteeship was imposed, Joe 
Hansen made an unconditional offer to Hormel for the strikers to return to work. Hormel 
waited until after the trusteeship was upheld in court on June 2nd to agree to being 
negotiations.

Most of the actual strike support and fund-raising has been done under the auspices of the 
United Support Group, which is formally independent of the union. This has not stopped the 
UFCW from trying to seize the support group funds, however, which indicates how determined 
the UFCW is to crush P-9âs rebellion.

The International leaders are attempting to set up a âdual unionâ of the bureaucrats, to 
replace the real union of P-9 strikers, and negotiate a new contract with Hormel over the 
heads of the workers.

On June 9th petitions were filed with the National Labor Relations Board,signed by 800 P-9 
strikers, to decertify the UFCW International in favor of an independent union. Initially 
âOriginal P-9â was the proposed name of the independent, but the NLRB rejected this name 
on the grounds that it would be confused with the official P-9, now controlled by the 
Internationalâs trustee. The new unionâs name was then changed to âNorth American Meat 
Packers Union.â

Supporters of the new independent estimate that there are between 12,000 and 30,000 
meatpackers in 30 locals across the midwest who may be willing to leave the UFCW for an 
independent union. Meanwhile, local P-40 in Wisconsin and local P-6 in Albert Lea, 
Minnesota, are refusing to pay their per capita dues to the International until the 
trusteeship is removed from local P-9.

The history of the Hormel struggle demonstrates once again how the present top-down union 
Internationals are bound to be in conflict with the rank and file who want control over 
their own movement and militant solidarity against the employers. To develop an effective 
challenge to the employing class and unionism self-managed by the rank and file, it is 
going to be necessary to develop new organization.

The usual argument against a new union is that it would be âdivisiveâ while so many other 
workers in the same industry remain within the âofficialâ union, in this case the UFCW. 
But surely the UFCW International has proven itself to be an obstacle to worker 
solidarity. Affiliation of workers in different workplaces with the same AFL-CIO-type 
âinternational unionâ only guarantees subordination to a common central bureaucracy. These 
vertical bureaucracies often work to oppose direct, horizontal solidarity between workers 
since it imposes risks and costs (such as strike benefits) to their organizations, 
disrupts cozy relationships with employers, and challenges their top-down control.

We are not saying that workers should automatically avoid the AFL-CIO-type unions,even 
when no other mass organization is feasible. Nor are we saying that workers should abandon 
the struggle within the AFL-CIO-type unions against top-down bureaucratic control and 
against sell-outs. But when workersâ efforts to mount an effective fight against employer 
power and to control their own struggle come into conflict with the top-down hierarchies 
in the unions, as at Hormel, the need and opportunity for new organization is clearly 
demonstrated.

A workers movement guided by the principles of rank-and-file democracy, worker solidarity, 
and militant struggle against the employing class is bound to develop new forms of 
organization, independent of the rotting corpse of American business unionism. The 
top-down structure of the AFL-CIO-type unions is an albatross around the neck of the 
American workforce. What is needed is a new form of organization in which the rank and 
file directly manage the struggle and the local organizations are linked together in 
horizontal, worker-to-worker solidarity.

----------------------------------------------


UFCW: Strategy of Appeasement

The United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWA) had been strongly influenced by the 
democratic and militant traditions inherited from the Independent Union of All Workers, 
founded at Hormel by IWW Organizers in 1933, and the left-wing socialists of the 
Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. With the competition between the UPWA and the 
Amalgamated Meatcutters Union for the allegiance of meatpacking workers, workers in the 
industry continued to gain higher wages, improved benefits, safety and job security. This 
continued from the founding of the IUWA and PWOC in the â30s up into the â60s.

During the period of American economic growth after World War II, meat-packing companies 
were investing heavily in new production capacity (new refrigeration, more automated 
techniques, etc). The federal governmentâs highway program made it more feasible to locate 
new plants out in the countryside, closer to where the animals were, and former big city 
packing centers like Chicago declined.

The Amalgamated was a conservative craft union of the AFL type. Despite the efforts of the 
UPWA and Amalgamated to build a pattern of common contract expiration dates and a national 
wage standard, the Amalgamated did permit the existence of an institution called the 
âSouthern differentialâ in which southern operations were allowed to pay their workers 
less. In other words, a lower wage for blacks, ârednecksâ and workers of Mexican ancestry.

The first break in this pattern was in the poultry industry, which began to move south in 
the â50s. At that time wages in the poultry industry were roughly equal to those in 
red-meat packing. By the 1970s the wage level in the poultry packing industry had fallen 
to less than half the red-meat rates.

In the early â60s a fledgling outfit opened a plant in Denison, Iowa. The company â Iowa 
Beef Processors â had new ideas about the beef business. Instead of shipping 
half-carcasses into the Eastern markets to be cut up and sold at retail level, this 
company would split up the beef into âprimal cutsâ and package them for retail. This meant 
that the grocery store didnât have to buy or butcher those cuts which werenât good sellers 
in their particular markets. This idea was very popular with supermarkets. But âboxed 
beefâ was not popular with retail butchers â it eliminated their jobs. But IBP bribed a 
certain International Vice-President of the Amalgamated and âboxed beefâ was allowed into 
selected Eastern markets.

With its plants located in rural areas, where unionism was weak, IBP could operate as a 
low-wage, non-union packer. Meanwhile, the mainline packers had been acquired by 
conglomerates: Greyhound bought Armour, LTV owned Wilson & Co., General Brands had Morell, 
etc. IBP was able to grow very rapidly during a period when these conglomerates were 
milking their meatpacking subsidiaries.

In 1967 the Amalgamated merged with the UPWA; the merged organization never acquired the 
will to organize IBP. In negotiations the major packers would routinely warn the 
Amalgamated, and later its successor, the UFCW, that they hadbetter get IBP into the 
industry pattern or suffer the consequences.

By the mid-â70s the Amalgamated bureaucracy could no doubt see that the conglomerates 
werenât investing in their plants. They could see the proverbial âwriting on the wall,â 
and looked around for a way to extricate themselves from the impending disaster. In 1979 
the Amalgamated merged with the AFL Retail Clerks union to form the UFCW. Today the UFCW 
Packinghouse Division constitutes only 9 percent of the membership of the AFL-CIOâs 
largest affiliate. Thus,the top bureaucrats of the UFCW have even less reason to be 
concerned about the fate of the industrial butcher.

With intense competition from low-wage outfits like IBP, and the general economic downturn 
of the mid-â70s, the employersâ concessions drive in the meatpacking industry began in 
earnest. When the dust settled from the union-busting,plant closings, bankruptcy ploys and 
conglomerate buyouts, the $10.60 standard wage had been cut down to $6 and some change per 
hour in many plants.

Beginning in the â70s, the UFCWâs strategy for dealing with employer aggression in an 
increasingly competitive environment was to use concessions as a means of âstabilizingâ 
wages and, hopefully, placating the bosses so they wouldnât make further demands for 
givebacks.

Though the master contracts with the major, old-line pork packers didnât expire till 
September 1982, the UFCW re-opened these contracts in December of 1981 in order to offer 
to freeze wages at $10.69 an hour until September 1985. This meant a wage cut at Oscar 
Mayer, where wages were then $11.27 per hour. At Hormel, Wilson, Armour, Swift and Morell, 
it meant a freeze at the wage rate that had been established in the 1979 contract.

The UFCW leaders thought that by taking this initiative to offer concessions in 1981 they 
would preserve the integrity of their master contracts and ward off future concessions. 
But it didnât work out that way.

In 1980 Dubuque Pack had threatened to close its doors unless it got concessions. The 
workers agreed and the company agreed to not seek additional concessions during the life 
of the contract. However, by March 1981, the entire hog kill department had been shut down 
and in October 1981 the workers agreed to a 16 percent wage cut. Despite these 
concessions, Dubuque Pack closed the plant anyway in October 1982 and it reopened as a 
non-union plant under a new name, DFL, and with wages cut to $6 an hour.

In June 1983 Wilson used bankruptcy to get out from under the master contract, which still 
had two years before expiration. Wages were cut to $6.50 an hour. Wilson was still making 
a profit at the time. The UFCW then struck for 22 days, which resulted in wages being 
raised to $8 per hour ($2.69 less than under the pre-bankruptcy contract).

Greyhound demanded further concessions for its Armour pork plants. When the workers voted 
to reject the concessions, the plants were shut down. Thirteen plants were later re-opened 
as non-union operations under the aegis of ConAgra. The only response of the UFCW has been 
drawn-out legal maneuvering and a consumer boycott youâve probably never heard about.

In 1983 Lewie Anderson (UFCW International Vice-President and head of the Packinghouse 
Division) admitted that the number of workers covered by the master contract had dropped 
by 40 percent. Instead of bringing the low-wage employers closer to the master contract 
rate, further concessions were made to Iowa Beef Processors, Rath and Pierce Packing. By 
January of 1985 the average hourly wage in meatpacking had fallen to $7.93, according to 
the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today [1986] only 40 percent of the meat butchered in the U.S. is union â down from 85 
percent ten years ago.

During this same period working conditions in the plants seriously deteriorated, as 
indicated by the rise of the injury rate. A number of changes in the industry contributed 
too this situation: speed up, tough competition from vicious low-wage producers like Iowa 
Beef Processors, changes in ownership, letting equipment deteriorate in anticipation of 
shutdowns, introduction of new technologies and a push for a rapid increase in 
productivity, and the unionâs loss of shop-floor bite.

The UFCWâs âstrategyâ of trying to appease the employers with concessions in order to 
âstabilizeâ wages and preserve jobs has been an obvious failure. The UFCWâs âmaster 
contractsâ have become a pathetic joke. In spite of all the talk of stabilizing packing 
wage rates at a ânew level,â Lewie Andersonnâs Packinghouse Division has completely done 
away with the common expiration dates for contracts and thrown away any chance of 
industry-wide bargaining for years to come. The UFCWâs prevailing philosophy is, âLetâs 
keep the union in the plants at any costââat any cost to the rank and file, that is. The 
rule of thumb in meatpacking today is that each company will squeeze or discard the UFCW 
for the lowest wages and the worst conditions it can get.

â Tom Wetzel and Jake Edwards

=================================================
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