BOOKS

Mattera, Philip

BOOKS Those Ornery Meatpackers ON STRIKE AT HORMEL: The Struggle for a Democratic Labor Movement by Hardy Green Temple University Press. 336 pp. $29.95. by Philip Mattera One of the many forms...

...Distrust, alienation, a loss of history, and a huddled-over sense of self-protection are our legacy...
...We can't understand an International trying to force us to take less," said Jim Guyette, P-9 president, at a 1985 meeting with UFCW officials...
...Yet when the issue was brought to a membership meeting, rank-and-file members stood up and called for continued defiance...
...resistance to the local's efforts to extend picketing to other facilities connected to Hormel...
...This is valuable, for the Hormel story is indeed steeped in ambiguities...
...The past decade has seen an outpouring of books about business: Such executives and wheeler-dealers as Lee Iacocca and Donald Trump published unabashedly self-serving memoirs...
...You won't watch films the same way again...
...34.95 hardcover, $14.95 paperback...
...raw courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles...
...Facing the Death Penalty is "a terribly sober book" that "makes us deeply uncomfortable," writes Henry Schwarzchild of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project in his foreword...
...We have been abandoned, these films told us, and must heal ourselves...
...In "How to Argue About the Death Penalty," Bedau marshals the evidence you'll need for as rational a case against capital punishment as possible—though he concedes that reason alone may never be able to resolve it...
...BOOKS BRIEFLY Eco-feuds ECO-WARRIORS: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement by Rik Scarce Noble Press...
...As one of the final insults, the trustees arranged to destroy by sandblasting a solidarity mural, dedicated to Nelson Mandela, that had been painted on the wall of the Austin Labor Center...
...close cooperation between unions and the community...
...It was often unclear whether the strikers were driven more by resentment over the loss of that paternalism—which had fallen victim to the labor-cost-cutting obsession of the 1980s—than by a desire to resurrect militant unionism...
...By contrast, the exploits of the union movement rarely make it between hard covers...
...support the argument that the death penalty...
...Government and troops did in Vietnam but simply for having felt so bad for so long...
...So writes Mark Crispin Miller in his introduction to the essays collected in Seeing Through Movies, and no one who has seen Total Recall, Dick Tracy, or Days of Thunder will dispute him...
...In advancing their anti-growth argument, Blumberg and Gottlieb also deal with the importance of reorganizing the structure of American corporate capitalism...
...The most arresting piece in the book is "Good Soldiers," Aufderheide's essay on the recent popularity of Vietnam-era films...
...Scarce's treatment is sympathetic...
...founder Dave Foreman has left the organization and denounced its recent direction...
...If that orner-iness spreads to more unions, the future of the labor movement will be much brighter...
...The 1985-86 walkout by Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) was more than a militant strike...
...Having broken through this wall of silence, On Strike at Hormel is a welcome arrival...
...His book's catalog of the UFCW's sins is not accompanied by an adequate explanation of what brought the union to this pass...
...The ultimate answer, they suggest is reduction— producing less, consuming less, wasting less...
...Even to avid movie-goers—but particularly to fans of alternative films and sentimental critics—the essays will come across as fresh and erudite, covering familiar ground with verve, insight, and intelligence...
...We are choking on our own trash, they note, and we can obtain only fleeting relief by resorting to such expedients as finding new landfills and dumping grounds...
...Corporate monopolies of every conceivable side of the entertainment industry have resulted in a relentless "image-generating system that includes television production companies and syndication firms, cable distribution networks, record companies, and numerous merchandising operations—as well as publishing companies, major magazines, and many newspapers...
...can only be considered a cruel, unusual, and unnecessary punishment...
...the placement of P-9 into trusteeship, and the negotiation of a settlement with the company that allowed strikebreakers to remain on the job...
...11.95 paperback...
...301pp...
...Green does a good job of presenting all sides of the dispute without slipping into simple-minded objectivity...
...Making Less WAR ON WASTE: Can America Win Its Battle with Garbage...
...Pat Aufderheide (senior editor of In These Times and frequent contributor to The Progressive...
...Hardy Green provides a thoughtful and richly detailed account of what is arguably the most important labor story of the past decade: the struggle of some 1,500 meatpackers and their families in the small town of Austin, Minnesota, against the combined forces of a Fortune 500 company, their own international union, and the legal system...
...It's not one of those collections intended to "objectively" present all sides of the debate...
...Indeed it is...
...You've got it here, and now you're trying to defuse it...
...If you're neither an environmental activist nor a sanitary engineer, why would you want to read 301 pages on the unsavory subject of garbage disposal...
...This is the orneriest group of people I've ever seen," remarked one board member, and the strike went on...
...Through free-dom-of-information laws, he also obtained documents revealing the anti-union attitudes of local and state law-enforcement officials...
...by Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb Island Press...
...Green provides a long list of reprehensible actions taken by the UFCW in this campaign: the use of union officials from other parts of the country to spy on P-9...
...To supplement his close personal contact with the strikers and their supporters, Green later conducted extensive interviews with key figures in the company and the UFCW International...
...At one point in the Hormel strike, when the Governor of Minnesota was bringing in the National Guard, the executive board was wavering, and it appeared that the strike might be called off...
...Yet for decades it enjoyed the benefits of an exceptional paternalism practiced by Hormel management, and thus developed a less-than-adversarial relationship with the company...
...solidarity and direct communication among locals—both within the same union and across union lines—rather than the traditional hierarchical forms of access...
...24.95 hardcover, $11.95 paperback...
...He has done free-lance research for Corporate Campaign, Inc., in the period following the Hormel strike...
...The company sought to slash wages by 23 per cent and otherwise gut P-9's contract...
...Seeing Through Movies, the latest in Pantheon's "Guide to Popular Culture" series, includes contributions from Miller (author of Boxed In: The Culture ofT...
...But for those who have heard some of the sound and fury emanating from such organizations as Greenpeace and Earth First!, Eco-warriors will help explain what it's all about...
...are better seen as reconstructing the place of Vietnam in American popular history, away from a political process and toward an understanding of the war as a psychological watershed...
...Stay the Executioner FACING THE DEATH PENALTY: Essays on a Cruel and Unusual Punishment edited by Michael L. Radelet Temple University Press...
...Works on the subject are doomed to failure because workers don't buy books—or so the conventional wisdom holds...
...Green mentions a few brave individuals in other locals who sided with the Austin strikers, but one is left wondering whether the rest of the union went along with the International...
...The scabs are the new union," a UFCW official said later...
...Seeing Through Movies teaches the reader to do just that at the movies, to pick out blatant product placement and thematic corruption in a once-great art form...
...What is also uncertain is whether the management of Hormel or the top officials of the UFCW were more to blame for the failure of the strike...
...The "noble grunt" film genre doesn't provide healing or palatable enemies— Aufderheide notes "the invisibility of the real warmakers" such as Richard Nixon— but rather insists on a lukewarm and disingenuous compensation: "We are on our way, in the movies, to forgiving ourselves not for anything the U.S...
...Advertising monopolies have infiltrated Hollywood, changing film endings to accommodate the whims of fickle screening audiences and selling products by putting them in the movie—practices, Miller argues, that obstruct cinematic pathos and actually upstage the actors...
...Klawans, in "Rose-Tinted Spectacles," actually makes mogul Ted Turner look good, proving that his dread colorization project has helped find and preserve many lost films...
...In any event, Green makes a convincing case that if there is any hope for revitalizing the labor movement, it will have to be done along the lines of the P-9 model...
...This is a collection of essays that deal with the death penalty as it affects human beings-condemned prisoners and their families, lawyers, ministers, and others directly involved with administration of this form of punishment...
...it would be helpful to have some of the more thoughtful assessments of "deep ecology" by such critics as Murray Bookchin (who, inexplicably, is mentioned nowhere in the book...
...While Biskind's "The Last Crusade" strikes the right notes about the Reagan-ization of movies that began with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, some of his observations—most notably about sexual metaphors in the Star Wars trilogy—are fanciful and over-interpretive...
...Numerous volumes detailed the dubious financial initiatives of the 1980s—the RJR Nabisco buyout, for example...
...by Philip Mattera One of the many forms of inequality between labor and capital these days occurs in the field of literature...
...Eco-warriors, by journalist Rik Scarce, is just published but already out of date: Since the book went to press, Earth First...
...Gomery traces the circular history of the movie house, from simple nickelodeon parlor to lavish social spot and back to the cramped and stuffy atmosphere of the Cineplex Odeon, noting that the "golden age" opulence of mid-century theaters "soon went the way of all other transitory niceties of American culture: It was extinct the moment it became unprofitable...
...34.95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback...
...Todd Gitlin (editor of Watching Television...
...As Green points out, it was a test of the corporate strategy of the Reagan era, of the tools that some parts of the labor movement had devised to respond to that strategy, and of the ability of the union hierarchy to respond to upheaval from below...
...P-9 itself had more than its share of contradictions...
...215 pp...
...It may be a sign of vitality or merely of petty rivalry, but the environmental movement suddenly finds itself divided, even splintered, into as many factions and schisms as have traditionally sapped the energy of the Left...
...The result is a work that does more than cheerlead for P-9...
...Perhaps most valuable is a new essay by Hugo Adam Bedau, a philosopher who has written widely on the subject...
...Thus we have Batman's ubiquity in Time/Warner merchandising, from HBO to rock videos, and Time magazine's cover featuring Scott Turow before the release of Presumed Innocent, the Warner Brothers film based on his novel...
...This is a persuasively radical work...
...266 pp...
...Mark G. Judge (Mark G. Judge has contributed to Sojourners and In These Times as well as The Progressive...
...In most places of the country, you have to look for people willing to fight...
...Even the corporate view is given a serious, if unsympathetic, hearing...
...And the UFCW showed no boldness in confronting concessions, pursuing instead a strategy of "controlled retreat," while going to great lengths to undermine the efforts of the workers in Austin who tried to hold the line...
...Green seems to share Guyette's bewilderment...
...Editor Michael L. Radelet, a sociologist at the University of Florida, writes, "All of the essays...
...Quoting a labor reporter to the effect that UFCW president William Wynn "is an amoral man" raises more questions than it answers...
...Green's book lacks a fuller analysis of the derogation of one of the country's largest unions...
...Stuart Klawans (film critic for The Nation...
...Management consultants produced an endless stream of book-length prescriptions for corporate strategy...
...That means, for example, a firm commitment to rank-and-file democracy...
...Although we don't look back to any golden age, we do sustain ourselves in clear remembrance of a time when the movies held a certain promise, since denied...
...300 pp...
...Indeed, they speak more eloquently to the psychological plight of the average moviegoer today than to any reality of the war years...
...Still, this is a valuable introduction to the "radical" environmentalists—those whose despair over the deterioration of the planet has moved them to take militant and sometimes violent action...
...Ray Rogers's Corporate Campaign, Inc., the labor consulting outfit called in by P-9 that ended up as hero or villain, depending on one's point of view, in the affair...
...Because Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb manage to explore fundamental social, political, and economic issues that reach to the roots of the way we live and govern ourselves...
...As I can attest from personal experience, commercial publishers are put off by labor themes...
...Gitlin examines film's long struggle and eventual surrender to the culture and technology of television...
...It was a union with a militant past, including origins in the radical Industrial Workers of the World...
...He cleverly breaks down the news stories covered by reporters in the movie Broadcast News and concludes from their not unrealistic fatuity, "In the year when the Iran-contra story was rarely out of the news, and the American news business had plenty to answer for, Jim Brooks delivered broadcast news's love letter to itself...
...During the Hormel strike, he was working for Philip Mattera writes on labor and economics and is the author of' 'Prosperity Lost" (Addison-Wesley, 1990...
...While such films as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket have been praised for their realism, Aufderheide claims that "noble grunt films...
...Over and over, what would have seemed intolerable just a few years ago has now become familiar, in part because the movies now are made deliberately to show us nothing, but to sell us everything...
...The reader also looks in vain for a description of what was going on in the rest of the UFCW while the International was subverting P-9...
...Green was in an excellent position to observe these experiments first hand...
...Douglas Gomery (author of The Hollywood Studio System), and Peter Biskind (executive editor of Premiere magazine...
...Seeing Anew SEEING THROUGH MOVIES edited by Mark Crispin Miller Pantheon...
...The war is over, but the damage remains...

Vol. 54 • December 1990 • No. 12


 
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