No retreat, no surrender
remembers a critical battle for labor in the midst of the Reagan years.
MOST PEOPLE know the name Hormel, if they know it at all, as a company that manufactures cheap canned foods. But for anyone who supported labor during the bitter years of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the name Hormel is synonymous with union-busting and corporate greed.
The resistance, on the other hand, came down to a single letter and single number: P-9.
P-9 was the local of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union in Austin, Minn., whose members stood up to Hormel and the other corporate goliaths, to a National Guard occupation of their town--and to their own International union when UFCW officials, backed by the whole AFL-CIO leadership, moved to crush the P-9 uprising.
Twenty-five years ago this week, 1,540 Hormel workers went on strike in Austin. It was the culmination of several years of preparations for the fight--and the beginning of months on the picket line, in Austin and other Midwestern towns where Hormel had operations and UFCW members wanted to resist concessions.
The strike--with its informal slogan "No retreat, no surrender" taken from a Bruce Springsteen song--became a national cause. As labor historian Peter Rachleff wrote for Dollars and Sense on the 15th anniversary of the strike:
[M]arches and rallies brought 10,000 supporters and more into the streets of Austin to challenge the National Guard and its tear gas, sit down in front of the plant gates, and go to jail. Tens of thousands of women and men sent checks large and small to the support committees, brought truckloads of food to Austin, and tried to help families survive the pressures of a prolonged struggle.
Ultimately, the P-9 strike was defeated, thanks to the combined efforts of the company, the state government and the courts, and an International union that turned on its members. But not before P-9ers and their allies challenged the pro-corporate offensive against workers in the 1980s--and provided a glimpse of an alternative for unions that relied on the ideas, the talents and the determination of rank-and-file members.
HORMEL IN Austin was an unlikely setting for one of the most important labor struggles of the 1980s. Hormel was a nearly 100-year-old company, still remembered for its family owners who encouraged the idea that employees were partners in the business. Austin was the flagship plant, with a town loyal to the company built up around it.
The first recorded sit-down strike in the U.S. took place at the Austin plant in November 1933. But this was an exceptional event. Hormel mostly enjoyed labor peace in Austin--the 1985 strike would be the first walkout there in 45 years. By tradition, when other Hormel plants went on strike, Austin kept working.
Workers in Austin were rewarded in the postwar years with good wages and benefits. They were examples of the "American Dream"--of working-class people enjoying, if not great wealth, then at least a steadily increasing standard of living and the hope of better in the future.
But the dream ran into the harsh reality of a corporate offensive, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, to regain the upper hand after the challenges of the 1960s social movements.
By the '80s, a conservative backlash was in full swing--against unions and labor rights, government programs for the poor and workers, racial justice, women's rights. All the policies and theories that would become synonymous with neoliberalism were taking root. The attack on union power was at the heart of the era. It got its symbolic start with the breaking of PATCO--the air traffic controllers union crushed by the federal government under Reagan (whose administration used a strategy drawn up by its Democratic predecessors).
By the late 1970s, something unheard of was taking place in the manufacturing industries that were the citadels of the labor movement's power. Corporations were demanding not just wage freezes, but wage cuts; not just the status quo, but concessions. Workers who dared to strike faced the threat of permanent replacement--by scabs who would keep their jobs even after the walkout ended.
The conservatized U.S. labor movement was completely unprepared for the onslaught, and the UFCW was no exception. The year before the Hormel strike, it was fastest-growing union in the country, but that growth was the product of mergers--the "P" in P-9 represented the local's origins in the old United Packinghouse Workers of America--rather than shop-floor organizing.
The bloated bureaucracy at the top of the UFCW saw no alternative but to retreat and retreat some more, in the hopes of avoiding total defeat.
In Austin, Hormel's management team saw an opportunity. In 1978, it promised--after extracting preferential treatment from the town and state governments--to replace its now-antiquated factory with a state-of-the-art plant. But only if Local P-9 agreed to a stunning set of concessions: a wage freeze for the life of a seven-year contract, increased production quotas, a two-tier wage system for new hires and--worst of all--the right to cut all wages without warning to match patterns elsewhere in the meatpacking industry.
Essentially, Hormel wanted to drive down wages to the level of its competitors, while maintaining its technological advantages and more experienced workforce. On the advice of the UFCW International, the then-docile P-9 leadership went along.
The strategy paid off for Hormel--by the mid-1980s, profits were increasing by double-digit percentages every year. Business Week called Hormel "the envy of the meatpacking industry," with a profit margin reportedly twice as high as its main competitors.
When the new plant opened in Austin in 1982, P-9 members learned what "state of the art" meant--a sped-up production line and an epidemic of workplace injuries. Within the year, there were 202 on-the-job injuries for every 100 workers at the Austin plant--20 times the overall national average and six times the average for meatpacking, an industry already known to be one of the most dangerous.
In other words, every worker in the Austin plant suffered an injury serious enough to report not once in the course of a year, but twice. Imagine the outcry if corporate executives suffered paper cuts at a similar rate.
THE STAGE was set for a rank-and-file rebellion. In 1983, P-9 members threw out the old local leadership and elected a slate that promised to fight all concessions. The new local president was Jim Guyette. He and his fellow officers took Hormel into mediation to try to get the concessions provisions in the contract loosened.
An arrogant management flung down the gauntlet. In October 1984, it invoked its ability to cut wages unilaterally and slashed pay at the Austin plant from $10.69 an hour to $8.25--a 23 percent cut. P-9 members lost almost $100 from every weekly paycheck.
Over time, mediation restored most of the wage cut--the company's final offer as the expiration of P-9's contract approached in August 1985 was $10 an hour. But Hormel was hammering the union in other ways. A mediator sided with management on retroactive cuts in health care benefits, leaving workers and their families liable for medical and dental bills they assumed were covered.
The company took aim at other benefits, and it claimed vast new powers to fire workers without recourse, to ignore seniority and to tear up work assignments. "Throughout [the first half of 1985]," Socialist Worker reported at the time, "workers began their shifts not knowing when the would leave the plant. Some days, they worked as few as five hours, and other days, they logged 12- or 14-hour shifts."
A good-paying union job with Hormel was becoming a nightmare--and the reverberations could be felt in Austin, a small-sized city like many others in the Midwest, built around blue-collar industries in the era of deindustrialization. According to Guyette, in the early 1960s, Hormel had a workforce of 7,000 people in a town with a population of 32,000. By the mid-1980s, there were 1,500 Hormel workers in a town of 22,000.
Austin was split down the middle as the confrontation escalated. Church leaders, civic organizations and the local paper dropped their talk about small-town neighborliness and sided with the company. The children of P-9ers reported lectures in school about how Hormel was only looking out for everyone's best interest.
Residents and local businesses divided out. On a weekend night, management and locally based executives could be found drinking at Tolly's Time Out--the P-9ers were regulars at Lefty's and the east-side bars. Lee Bonorden, who worked for the Austin paper, remembered going to Grace Lutheran Church in early 1985: "The cops sat on one side of the church, and the militant strikers sat on the other side. They wouldn't speak. And this was when they were only talking about walking off the job."
In search of more leverage against the company after the unilateral wage cut in October 1984, Local P-9's leadership went to Corporate Campaigns Inc. (CCI), a consulting firm for unions founded by labor activist Ray Rogers, which claimed to specialize in providing an alternative to "old-fashioned" tactics of strikes and picket lines.
CCI argued that corporations in the modern era held all the cards in a strike situation--but that they were vulnerable because they were dependent on sources of financing and their biggest corporate customers. If unions could strike at these "financial pressure points"--and, through boycotts and symbolic protest, get loans called in and big contracts canceled--management would have to cave.
There were many critics of the corporate campaign--some among top labor leaders who opposed action in any form, but many more among rank-and-file activists and radicals. The strategy only rarely experienced the kind of success its champions promised. Unionists following a corporate campaign were under pressure to be concerned about their "public image" above all else. And besides, they were very expensive. Labor activist Ken Gagala estimated that Rogers' corporate campaign for P-9 cost $340,000 in the first six months of 1985, with half of the money going directly to CCI.
Working for P-9, Rogers and CCI identified a major regional bank, First Bank Systems, as critical to Hormel's operations, and the local launched an energetic campaign to put pressure on it. But the impact was minimal. First Bank weathered the calls for customers to withdraw their funds and simply told P-9 it had no control over labor relations at Hormel.
The corporate campaign did have some positive effects, however. Because of it, the battle in Austin gained national publicity, particularly among labor and political activists willing to devote their energies to building solidarity. Even more important, the corporate campaign depended on mobilizing the rank and file of P-9 to take an active role in the fight.
ON AUGUST 17, with the company refusing to move on its demands for concessions, Local P-9 went on strike. More than 90 percent of members had voted to reject the company's final offer.
The UFCW reluctantly gave its sanction to the strike in Austin, but top officials continued to criticize local leaders. The International claimed that P-9 was "going it alone."
For example, among the many statements made against P-9 by International officials was a letter from UFCW President William Wynn, who wrote: "Instead of acting together with other Hormel workers to accomplish the most good for the greatest number of Hormel workers, Local P-9 leaders sought a better deal for Austin alone."
The charge was pure fabrication, as Jim Guyette pointed out in his response: "Local P-9 never withdrew from Hormel chain negotiations. We were simply never invited by the International union [to participate]." Guyette said that P-9's new executive board had tried to find out how they could support locals whose contracts were expiring, but were pressured by International officials to stand aside--and commended for it when they did.
Essentially, the UFCW International wanted P-9 to accept wage cuts and other concessions to bring them down to the level of other Hormel workers. The P-9ers, by contrast, argued that a successful fight against concessions in Austin could be a first step toward raising wages and conditions for everyone.
But the International continued to slander P-9ers as out for themselves only. After emerging from another browbeating in a closed-door meeting with UFCW officials in Chicago, P-9's Business Agent Pete Winkels commented: "The only union members in that room today who haven't taken any concessions of any kind were the four officials we talked to."
In Austin, the International had its supporters from the beginning, a core of rank-and-file members who opposed the Guyette reform slate and challenged strategies for stepping up the fight. They became part of a steady back-to-work drumbeat that built through the months going into 1986.
But the majority of P-9 members remained committed to the fight. Their determination was the strike's real source of strength.
The P-9 strategy depended on rank-and-file involvement, and it could be seen from the moment you walked into the local's headquarters in the Austin Labor Center.
With weekly strike benefits from the UFCW running at $65--before they were cut back to $40--the P-9ers immediately organized a kitchen to feed picketers as well as volunteers who came to offer solidarity. There was a food and clothing back, stocked with donations that came in by the truckload from sympathetic union locals, political and community organizations, and local farmers. Other programs helped strikers who got in a financial jam.
Whatever the hour, the auditorium of the labor center always seemed to have a meeting going on, whether it was about reaching out for support or discussing the next action or responding to the latest company lie. Usually, a strike leader or a member of the United Support Group, formed by P-9 members' spouses, was at the front of the room, but the discussion wheeled back and forth among the audience.
For anyone who witnessed it firsthand, the P-9 struggle was an energizing lesson in rank-and-file power and solidarity in action.
THE AUGUST strike shut down the Austin plant, but as the weeks dragged on, it became clear that the corporate campaign wasn't having much impact. On the other hand, P-9 members were getting a warm reception when they traveled to other Hormel plants.
In an interview with Socialist Worker, Pete Winkels described the caravans sent out for four- and five-day stretches: "We've been building a lot of support down there, and we've found out a lot of people are fed up with the way things are going." As a result, Winkels said, a P-9 meeting passed a unanimous resolution "that we would do everything in Austin within our means should anybody suffer any disciplinary action for honoring our picket lines."
So spreading the strike down the Hormel chain was on the agenda. But the International leadership was putting immense pressure on the local.
Finally, in December, UFCW President Wynn issued a joint statement with Jim Guyette promising that the International would sanction roving pickets if Hormel didn't bargain in good faith. UFCW leaders promptly arranged negotiations with management and emerged with an offer that differed little with the contract P-9 had already rejected.
Wynn and the UFCW demanded a vote. The proposal was debated at a P-9 union meeting and rejected by a 2-to-1 margin. The International demanded a mail ballot. P-9 agreed, and the offer was defeated again. Denied a second time, UFCW officials claimed that P-9 leaders had fixed the ballot, and they went back on their word to support solidarity actions.
By this point, the company was feeling bold enough to try to reopen the Austin plant. It set January 13 as the day to start bringing in scabs--among them, the core of P-9 members who got active encouragement from the International to cross their own picket lines.
When January 13 rolled around, however, the replacement workers faced not only P-9 members, but a mobilized Minnesota labor movement filling the streets around the Austin plant. Hormel still couldn't restart production.
To counter this, the company delivered an ultimatum to the mayor of Austin--himself a P-9 striker. As Austin resident Doug Dammel described, "He was called down to the courthouse by the police chief and some other members of the City Council, and they more or less told him to resign, or call the National Guard down here. And the guy who would take the mayor's place is a scab. So it didn't matter for Hormel--either way, the Guard was coming."
So martial law was declared in Austin, courtesy of Minnesota's Gov. Rudy Perpich of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. A court injunction against picketing was ultimately extended to the point that any gathering of more than three strikers or six strike supporters was illegal in the eight-square-block area around the plant. "They've had the city streets blocked off," said one striker. "You have to have a little orange scab card to use the streets."
Hundreds of P-9 members were arrested and jailed for crimes as minor as slowing down on the freeway exit outside the plant. After one civil disobedience protest in front of the plant gates, Ray Rogers was arrested and jailed on charges of "criminal syndicalism"--a law trumped up during the 1919 Red Scare.
WHEN THE company began running scabs in Austin, P-9ers spread out to other Hormel plants to ask their fellow UFCW members to honor their promises of solidarity--though without the sanction of the International.
Some 225 miles south of Austin lay Ottumwa, Iowa, site of another Hormel slaughterhouse. On January 27, P-9ers joined with members of UFCW Local 431 for a march to the plant gates. All but a handful of workers on both shifts--some 800 in all--honored the picket line. The company retaliated the next day by firing 478 workers and locking out the rest. Nevertheless, the Ottumwa workers sent a bus to Hormel's Fremont, Neb., plant to help P-9ers persuade workers there to strike in solidarity--about 150 workers did.
When P-9 workers turned up in Dubuque at an FDL plant--Hormel had signed an agreement with FDL to keep its product lines running in case of a shutdown of its whole chain--the unfortunately named Mel Maas, president of the UFCW local in Dubuque, stood with International officials to denounce P-9ers. And still, half the workforce refused to cross the picket line.
Furious International officials escalated their campaign of sabotage against the Austin strikers. P-9 members who opposed the local leadership were actively encouraged to scab. Lewie Anderson, the International's director for meatpacking, was interviewed on National Public Radio, where he claimed that the real problem was P-9 members were making too much money and would make Hormel unprofitable.
In February, at the AFL-CIO meeting at the posh Florida resort town of Bal Harbour, William Wynn stood next the federation's fossilized President Lane Kirkland to denounce P-9 and its "fascist tactics."
Outside the official labor movement, the P-9 strike still had wide support. It showed through on February 15, when thousands of people gathered in Austin for a huge rally. The featured speaker was Rev. Jesse Jackson, then in between his two Rainbow Coalition campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But behind the scenes, UFCW leaders were getting ready for the kill.
In March, the International revoked sanction for the Austin strike, cut off strike benefits, ordered local leaders to lead a return to work and declared the boycott of Hormel products over. The next day, P-9 members met and voted overwhelmingly in favor of continuing the strike--but the International had left them to go it alone, along with the hundreds of workers who honored P-9 picket lines.
In mid-April, there was another weekend of solidarity set for Austin. On Friday morning, as dawn broke, some 400 strikers and other labor activists took over the road in front of the main plant gate, protected by a ring of disabled vehicles. Lines of National Guard soldiers waded into the crowd several times, but they were repelled each time. Finally, the Guardsmen drenched picketers in tear gas until the protest was broken up.
The plant-gate rally only kept the scabs out for the morning, but the authorities cracked down again. Hours before the bogus criminal syndicalism charge was dismissed in court as unconstitutional, Ray Rogers was arrested again--this time for inciting a riot outside the plant, even though he was more than a mile away at the time. By the end of the day, there were standing warrants for the arrest of the entire P-9 executive board and several dozen other strike leaders.
The next day, thousands of people again attended a mass support rally, but rather than bring these supporters back to the plant, Guyette merely announced a stepped-up boycott campaign. It was a sign of how embattled the P-9 leaders felt.
A few days later, the UFCW International concluded a three-day trusteeship hearing, held in Minneapolis, not Austin. A final decision was delayed, but on May 7, but the UFCW ruled in favor of removing P-9's leadership and putting the local under the control of a regional official. Union meetings were discontinued at the Austin Labor Center--workers who asked about the next local meeting were told they needed a petition with 600 names on it for one to be held.
Officially, P-9 members continued the fight through the end of the year. But the die was cast. Some 1,000 strikers either took early retirement or went onto a list to be recalled to their jobs at the Austin plant at the whim of the company--300 of the most militant strikers were banned outright. The 1,000 scabs in the plant since January got preferential treatment--with the blessing of the UFCW.
HOW COULD the UFCW's International leaders act so viciously toward members whose only crime was standing up against concessions?
This can't be explained by a difference of opinion over tactics. UFCW officials behaved as they did because of their contradictory position as labor leaders.
In general, the interests of union leaders aren't bound up with the success of a particular strike or stopping a concessions contract or plant closure--their jobs aren't threatened by any of these. Rather, their main concern is keeping dues money flowing in and preserving their own positions.
And for the top officers of the UFCW, these were extremely lucrative positions. President Wynn's annual salary was $160,000, plus perks. Among the P-9 strikers, Wynn was known as "Mr. T" because of his preference for gold chains.
To Wynn and the other UFCW leaders, the P-9 revolt represented a threat. The victory of the Guyette slate in 1983 inspired other reform battles in UFCW locals. When a dissident slate won a majority of the executive board at a Madison, Wis., UFCW local representing Oscar Mayer workers, the reformers' first act was to muzzle the pro-International local president, banning him from criticizing P-9.
So a victory for the P-9 strike represented a greater threat to union leaders than its defeat. "They've sold too many meatpackers down the river," P-9 striker Kevin Hatfield told Socialist Worker. "If we win this thing, we'd make them really look bad."
In the end, the International succeeded in crushing the P-9 threat. But the legacy of the Hormel strike lived on. In the mid-1990s, when workers at A.E. Staley Manufacturing, a food-processing factory in Decatur, Ill., faced a tough battle, they adopted many of P-9's methods to build national and international support.
P-9's efforts to make links with other struggles for social justice--in particular, the civil rights and anti-racist struggle, represented by Jackson's participation in February 1986--also set an inspiring example for future labor activists. It was a stark contrast to the sclerotic conservatism of union leaders like Lane Kirkland.
And for a whole generation of people who wanted to resist during the Reagan years--who grew sick of the decade of greed, of union-busting attacks, and the groveling inaction of top union leaders--P-9's fight was our fight. Amid so many defeats, we remember the importance of the war in Austin. As Socialist Worker wrote:
The Hormel strike is a living answer to those who argue that workers in the U.S. are passive, no longer a force for change. The Hormel strike also raised to the forefront the importance of solidarity--both within the same industry and across industry lines.
And the Hormel strikers showed that concessions do not have to be taken lying down--that there are workers many unions and workplaces around the country that understand the need to fight back against the bosses.
