P-9 FIGHTS THE ODDS: THE HORMEL STRIKE CHALLENGES AMERICAN LABOR

...Now the Guard is gone, and P-9 is able to close down the plant— without using violence—whenever it is willing to take the arrests that follow...

...Most significantly, Hormel's biggest potential expenses lie in the future...

...They still slip on blood...

...The new plant was the most efficient in the industry with Hormel-designed machines and robots enabling workers to can 440 Spams a minute and bone 1,600 pork shoulders an hour...

...The result was an industry plagued with bankruptcies, plant closings, and an upsurge of small, nonunion packers paying wages as low as $6 an hour...

...I watch the television crews arrive...

...In 1981, however, a year before the new plant was scheduled to open, Hormel again demanded additional concessions from all its workers...

...Now that optimism has faded...

...Their actions are suicidal...

...Hormel had not, they point out, acquired its less expensive FDL and Dold Pack processing operations at that time and was vulnerable to a united front...

...Less a labor action than a defiant shaking of fists at large economic forces," was the Times's version of P-9's "highly publicized failure," and two days later the Post completed the postmortem...

...Local P9 has chosen the wrong target at the wrong time," the UFCW insists, and since rescinding authorization on March 14th of this year for P9 to continue its strike against Hormel, the UFCW has made "poststrike" payments to P-9 workers dependent on their willingness to sign an unconditional offer to return to work and cross P-9 picket lines...

...A P-9 legal victory will limit this damage, but whether any victory that does not result in some reconciliation between P-9 and the international will be of practical use is open to question...

...The real question is whether the threat of an expanded boycott and P-9's militance will be enough to force Hormel—which in the wake of its record profits raised its president's salary from $339,000 to $570,000—to back down...

...They are sure to get all the details and at the same time miss everything important: the P-9 strikers' anger, their belief that long ago they ran out of easy options...

...No one is going to be hurt...

...Our strategy is to win exemplary contracts from the stronger, more profitable companies like Hormel, and then use them to pull up wages and conditions at weaker plants rather than take some abstract promise of better conditions in the future," Jim Guyette declared in response to Lewie Anderson's assertion that his "differences with P-9 are strategic," aimed at "trying to build a solid floor against concessions, shoring up the bottom at the weakest plants, and then raising everyone's wages together...

...It comes from the company paying the lowest rate of the big packers...

...A number of men have lost fingers on the new power equipment...

...The UFCW's April 14th trusteeship hearings in Minneapolis were held in an atmosphere designed to pave the way for the international taking over the local as quickly as possible...

...The Austin Labor Center, where P-9 has its offices, is a low brick building that blends in neatly with the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall down the block and the car wash across the street...

...Those unionists lining up with P-9 are, on the other hand, just as vehement in believing that the "No Retreat, No Surrender" slogan printed on its members' blue windbreakers represents a strategy P-9 should be allowed to follow...

...When the strike began, David Moberg observed in his In These Times account, "It is a shame that the international union has not responded to the militancy and initiative of Local P-9...

...From a high of $9 that year, it has gone to $8.85 in 1983, $8.17 in 1984, and $8.10 in 1985...

...They point out that if the UFCW had adopted their anticoncessionary position in 1984, a united front would also have been possible, and they are not convinced by the UFCW's argument that it has turned the corner by virtue of the fact that the contracts it has signed since 1985 call for wage increases...

...The UFCW saw Armour, which Greyhound sold to ConAgra in 1983 and which had cut wages to $6 an hour, as its priority target...

...The UFCW's contention that P-9 will finally have to make the kinds of concessions it does not want in order to settle with Hormel could, of course, prove correct...

...By the time the police and sheriff's deputies arrive in strength, it is after eight, and by the time the process of physically removing the strikers is completed, it is at least noon— too late for the early shift to get much done or for a plant with the technology for killing 750 hogs an hour to make up for lost production time...

...When you go to Austin, what lies behind Guyette's opposition to the UFCW's "controlled retreat" strategy becomes more evident...

...The UFCW fears that between now and September, when most of its Hormel contracts (the key exceptions are the Iowa plants at Ottumwa and Knoxville) expire, it will be facing a decertification election in Austin...

...Anderson and the UFCW leadership also believe that the concessionary contract they signed with Hormel in 1984 would have been much stronger if P-9 had been with them in the final bargaining sessions...

...That belief proved wrong...

...The UFCW says it went on the attack in response to P-9's provocation, but at this point the UFCW's savaging of P-9 has gone beyond mere counterattack...

...In the early rounds the victories have all been the UFCW's...

...The Center has the feel of a combat headquarters, and that intensity is made all the more dramatic because the combatants are not just the P-9 strikers but their spouses and children, for whom the Labor Center is also a gathering place...

...But one can also see why the P-9 strikers are not persuaded by Anderson...

...Worse still, the differences between P-9 and the UFCW now seem about to be fought out in a long and bitter court battle...

...At the Ottumwa, Iowa, plant, 511 workers have been dismissed for refusing to cross picket lines set up by P-9, and recently UFCW Local P-40 at the Patrick Cudahy Company in Wisconsin issued a handout that warned consumers, "The strike in Austin, Minnesota, by UFCW Local P-9 against Hormel (the most profitable meat packer in the country) is very much alive...

...Only now, they face these dangers on speededup equipment that in itself has become a menace...

...292 The broader issues that P-9 wanted raised in order to explain why it had followed its independent course were never allowed...

...But in the absence of such concerted action, P-9 was prepared to go it alone and not hinder a settlement other locals wanted to make...

...P-9 also discovered that protective language in the UFCW's summary of the 1981 contract was not in the final version...

...Although by virtue of its 1978 contract P-9 was in a more secure position than other Hormel locals, it agreed...

...The scope of the hearing was equally limited...

...The clearest threat to progress comes not from the company paying the highest effective labor rate of the pork-packing firms," Lewie Anderson declared...

...Working in Austin at a family-owned plant, it was possible to be both blue collar and middle class at the same time and to have one's labor valued...

...Doughnut crumbs and saliva are still frozen to the wool scarf I wrapped around my face to keep warm...

...For P-9, which according to the terms of its 1978 contract could not strike in 1984, the ideal solution would be one in which all the workers in the Hormel chain would join in opposing concessions of any sort...

...The company is also paying increased distribution costs as well as between $600,000 and $1.2 million for special security...

...Rogers is described by the UFCW as the "Ayatollah of Austin," and together he and Guyette are seen as having "successfully manipulated" a naive local through a "propaganda stream" that "would have made Joseph Paul Goebbels's Nazi propaganda ministry envious...

...An intralabor battle this dramatic would be news any time...

...It is clear that they have an opportunity to win with a determined, involved local that epitomizes what union leaders have been saying they need...

...The flagship plant is a monument to high tech...

...The Road to Refusal WHAT BROUGHT P-9 TO THIS POSITION Of defiance is a history that up to 1984 was anything but militant...

...At this point the P-9 strikers need—at a minimum—a benignly neutral UFCW that will let them carry on their struggle in Austin and use the militance that struggle has generated to work with other UFCW locals for a master agreement on the contracts that must be negotiated with Hormel by September...

...The suit, filed in U.S...

...The only solution is for them to end the strike, and I will try to get them their jobs back...

...When the new Austin plant opened in 1982, P-9 believed that at last its period of sacrifice was over...

...When in the late 1970s Hormel told workers 289 that it was going to leave Austin unless it received concessions that would enable it to build a modern $100 million plant, the announcement came as a shock...

...Where the Good Life is Here to Stay...

...Questions of Strategy WITHIN THE LABOR MOVEMENT, the divisions have been just as sharp...

...As a result P-9 has been able to get around the financial crunch imposed on it by opposition from the leadership of the UFCW and the AFL-CIO...

...P-9's most recent strategy combines sit-down tactics from the 1930s and civil disobedience from the 1960s...

...8:30 and the police and sheriff's deputies have started the arrests...

...Since that time, relations between P-9 and the UFCW have worsened...

...On May 8th, the UFCW officially put P-9 in trusteeship, a step that, if upheld in the courts, allows the international to seize P-9's assets, suspend its officers, and run its operations...

...By 1984, despite a year of record profits and public admission that it would have no trouble coming up with another $100 million for additional acquisitions, Hormel was, however, again pushing its workforce for concessions...

...Those siding with the UFCW leadership see P-9's difficulties as proof that, in the era of Ronald Reagan, the only way for unions to survive is through a concessionary strategy...

...Across the country locals have also come to P-9's aid...

...There is an unspoken understanding at work...

...But for the workers inside, the changes that industrial design has brought about have been much less spectacular...

...Although P-9 came into existence in 1933 with a sit-down strike, it was able to avoid another strike for the next 52 years...

...The hearings were held in the Minneapolis Public Library in a secondfloor room that seats only fifty people...

...Charles Nyberg, Hormel's general council and a senior vice president, constantly reminds reporters that the international long ago stopped supporting its "maverick local," and Hormel has moved to make any strike settlement more difficult by insisting that the strike breakers it has hired since the Austin plant reopened are permanent rather than replacement workers...

...There is the corporate discipline this oncebenign family business seems intent on exercising over its workforce...

...Corporate Campaign has raised more than $1 million for P-9 and developed an Adopt a P-9 Family program that allows locals friendly to P-9 to sponsor a strike family...

...The stakes in the Hormel strike go far beyond Austin, however, and far beyond the question of whether a militant local with fewer than 1,500 members can stand up to a company that in fiscal 1985 had sales of $1.5 billion and turned in a record profit of $38.6 million...

...Its only alternative, the UFCW argues, was to make midcontract concessions with the remaining giant meat packers and focus its efforts on raising substandard wages at new plants...

...What Lies Ahead...

...The membership will be hamstrung in their efforts to effectively organize and their bargaining position with the company will be severely undermined...

...Under the founder's son, Jay, Hormel instituted a guaranteed annual wage, emphasized production quality and labor-management cooperation, and through the Hormel Foundation, which owns 45.6 percent of the company stock, poured money back into Austin...

...There is only a 69-cent hourly wage difference between what P-9 was asking for when it went out on strike and what other Hormel locals are currently being paid...

...On the inside, the Labor Center has the look of a union hall from the 1950s...

...Drivers coming off the highway are greeted with a sign that says, "Austin...

...In turn, the rank and file of P-9 are portrayed as "innocent victims of Local P-9's extremist actions," men and women trapped in a "hopeless cause" that in trade union terms amounts to "mass suicide...

...Despite the hiring of 600 replacement workers and an estimated 400 P-9 workers who have crossed their loCal's lines, the Austin plant is not operating at anywhere near normal efficiency...

...But in the face of a ten-month strike by Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers UnionAFL-CIO (UFCW), that sign no longer has the credibility it once did...

...The Bureau of Labor employment and earnings statistics show a continuing drop in the average hourly wage paid in meat packing since 1982...

...To help build the new plant, workers agreed to put their incentive pay in an escrow fund that would provide Hormel with a $20 million loan on which the company would not have to begin repayments until the plant was completed...

...No matter how this strike ends, Austin will not go back to being the quiet town where there was always steady work and Jay Hormel, the founder's son, is remembered as a man who personally shook each worker's hand on Christmas eve...

...Thousands of unionists traveled to Austin April 12th for a mass rally there, and in other cities P-9 support groups have been started...

...In its countersuit, P-9 has spelled out the stakes that lie ahead...

...They see contracts such as the $6.65 per hour one signed by Swift Independent Packing in Georgia as painfully low, and when they look at the overall wage trend in meat packing, they remain understandably fearful...

...Although the UFCW constitution allows the hearing officer in a trusteeship case to formulate "whatever additional rules may be required to insure a full, fair, and expeditious hearing," hearing officer Ray Wooster made a point of limiting testimony to the question of whether P-9 had disobeyed the UFCW's order to end its strike with Hormel as of March 14th...

...To help insure this, P-9 wants baseballtype arbitration on work schedules and standards as well as the 52-week layoff notice guaranteed under its old contract, and assurance that all strikers will get their jobs back...

...No one is worried that it will be noon before production gets started up again...

...They failed to realize that striking in the 1980s is a "lost cause" and must be replaced by "middleground survival strategies...

...But what is going on inside the Labor Center is anything but a throwback to the 1950s...

...But P-9 was not prepared to resist Hormel's threat...

...In Austin it is clear that P-9 is not engaged in a romantic crusade nor led by a radical leadership out of touch with the rank and file...

...shift...

...But at this point, money is not the only item preventing an agreement...

...Then the UFCW negotiated a contract in which wages were cut to $9 an hour (they have since gone up to $10), with a reduction in benefits as well...

...In the Austin plant the emphasis has been on speedy rather than safe production...

...A March rally at United Auto Workers District 65 headquarters in New York filled the building to overflowing...

...It is the rank and file that voted in Jim Guyette, voted out an executive board that favored the UFCW concessionary strategy, and by a margin of 1,261 to 96 opposed settling with Hormel on the terms the UFCW proposed in 1984...

...I am entirely confident that the international union in this case has given wise and sound advice," AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland observed at the organization's winter conference in Bal Harbour, Florida, before going on to say he had nothing to add to or subtract from the UFCW's description of the P-9 leaders as "false prophets...

...P-9 was convinced that arbitration would support its claim that because of its 1978 and 1981 contracts it did not have to take a cut in wages...

...All you hear is, 'Be thankful you've got a job...

...In arbitration P-9 learned that the "me too" clause in its contract prevailed over any agreement it had that wages would be stabilized...

...Most serious of all has been the public war of words between the UFCW and P-9...

...Some of these time-lost injuries have been minor, but in a plant where meat grinders, sausage stuffers, and skinning machines are standard equipment, many of the injuries are disfiguring ones that surgery cannot cure...

...In the summary P-9 was given by the UFCW, the opening sentence declared, "The cost of living adjustment which is now in effect will be incorporated into the rates, and there will be no increase or reduction in rates for the balance of the present term of the contract and for the 1982-85 term of the Agreement...

...When it was completed in 1982, the new plant put to rest the fears of people in this company town of 23,000 that Hormel would move, taking with it a payroll that since 1891 has made life possible here...

...Unions that have attempted to send P-9 money via the interna288 tional have had their checks returned, and sympathetic locals have been pressured to remain silent...

...For P-9 the only choice has been to challenge the UFCW's trusteeship takeover with a countersuit of its own...

...Master agreements—contracts covering an entire company and having a common expiration date—with Armour, Swift, Cudahy, and Rath were undermined as conglomerates moved into meat processing, taking over the industry's giants, selling off their assets, and refusing to modernize old plants...

...At 4 a.m...

...The new contract seemed to affirm the guarantees of its 1978 contract...

...For P-9, Hormel's 1984 demand for concessions added insult to injury...

...Hormel Spam has a 73-percent share of the canned luncheon meat market...

...The demand made a mockery of the 1978 agreement by which the local had helped build the new plant and, worse still, gave no indication that Hormel was prepared to stop asking for givebacks...

...The Minnesota strikers were forced to fight alone in a battle they couldn't win," the Post declared...

...As SUMMER BEGINS, the immediate danger for P-9 comes, however, from the likelihood that the differences between it and the UFCW will encourage Hormel to stiffen its resistance...

...The P-9 strike has become an intralabor battle of enormous proportions...

...Then it went to a living wage...

...The P-9 strikers then park their cars as close as possible to the Hormel gates and lock the doors, taking their keys with them...

...290 Bitter Intraunion Relations THE RESULT IS A STRIKE IN WHICH THE intralabor quarrel P-9 wishes it did not have to fight has taken up as much time as the battle with Hormel...

...Next the strikers scheduled to be arrested that day wedge themselves between the cars and the gates...

...When the plant reopened in January after being shut down for five months, Governor Rudy Perpich called in the National Guard...

...The imposition of a trusteeship in and of itself will have a crippling, if not devastating, impact on the ability of the local to carry out the will of the rank and file with respect to reaching a settlement with the Hormel Company," P-9 declared...

...We cannot raise the roof unless our foundation is solid," UFCW packinghouse director Lewie Anderson insists...

...The average cost to each P-9 worker for the loan to Hormel was $12,000 to be repaid at 6 percent interest, but in a period of economic instability in the packinghouse industry, the tradeoff seemed worth it...

...Washington Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell refused to block temporarily the UFCW's takeover of P-9, and in Minnesota Federal District Judge Edward Devitt issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting P-9 from removing any of its records or transferring money from its headquarters in Austin...

...P-9 is not going to settle with Hormel unless steps are taken to bring down the Austin injury rate...

...As far as P-9 is concerned, there is nothing suicidal or selfish in going on the offensive in the fashion it has...

...Now it's a survival wage...

...On the other side of the dispute stands P-9, which charges that "UFCW leaders have sided with and apologized for the Hormel Corporation...

...There is also the everpresent carpal tunnel syndrome—a disorder that packinghouse workers are prone to as a result of the repetitive trauma of cutting meat and that ends in lost sensation and circulation in the hands...

...The UFCW's principal targets have been Jim Guyette, who in 1984 won the presidency of P-9 on the basis of his opposition to more concessions, and Ray Rogers, the head of Corporate Campaign, Inc., which P-9 hired in the fall of 1984 in anticipation of a long and bitter struggle against Hormel...

...Even the chain-link fence surrounding it does not alter its streamlined look...

...Fearing the loss of their jobs and the devastation of Austin, P-9 members agreed in 1978 to the conditions Hormel set for remaining in town...

...But what has made this dispute so significant is that it has come to be seen as a test case for the labor movement in the 1980s...

...I keep thinking of what one of the strikers said to me yesterday...

...293...

...When my Dad worked here we had a saving wage...

...They are convinced that Ray Rogers, the labor organizer P-9 originally hired to carry out a corporate campaign against Hormel and First Bank Systems, is correct when he says, "You can create a moment in history, so people can turn to Austin and say, 'That's where they turned back the onslaught against the labor movement.' " The UFCW defends its Hormel strategy by pointing out that beginning in the late 1970s it was faced with a meat-packing industry in turmoil...

...workers drive out of the Austin Labor Center and head for the Hormel gates...

...For Hormel, these slowdowns are only the most obvious cost of the strike...

...Since then, the New York Times and the Washington Post have described the strike in terms more appropriate to the obituary than the editorial page...

...The UFCW responded by calling on the workers at its eight Hormel plants to strike if a better arrangement could not be reached...

...On the front entryway hand-lettered P-9 posters share space with framed black-and-white photographs of Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, and Walter Mondale...

...It is also, despite crossovers, the rank and file you see on picket lines that, when they are thrown up, are highly effective in limiting production at a plant designed to account for between 40 and 50 percent of Hormel's processing...

...The union points out that there has been an injury rate 119 percent higher in the new plant than the old, with over a third of the plant's workers suffering time-lost injuries in 1984, the last full year of operations...

...The picket lines left the Austin Labor Center at four o'clock, and for the last two hours the men who are going to be arrested this morning have been waiting for the early morning shift to arrive...

...As the company acknowledges, production has not returned to prestrike levels...

...They still work in areas known as "the kill" and "the cut...

...As Jim Guyette would later observe, "If the newest plant in the industry takes a cut in wages, then the other plants are going to say they can't compete...

...Citing a "me too" clause in the 1978 contract that allowed it to lower wages if there were a change in the national pattern of wages negotiated in the meat-packing industry, Hormel announced that it intended to lower its union wages 23 percent, from $10.69 an hour to $8.25...

...P-9 faces an uphill battle against a company ranked 235th on the Fortune 500 list, and in the absence of AFLCIO support its problems have been made even harder...

...P-9 is convinced that with help from friends inside and outside the labor movement, it can stop the givebacks demanded by Hormel...

...How matters will go in the middle legal rounds now becomes the major issue...

...FROM THE OUTSIDE, Hormel's new $100 million hog-processing plant in Austin, Minnesota, bears no resemblance to the gloomy brick Chicago slaughterhouses Upton Sinclair described eighty years ago in The Jungle...

...This time the company wanted a wage freeze and in return promised there would be no plant closings in 1982...

...District Court in Washington, seeks $13 million in damages from the UFCW for its "bad faith" campaign to undermine the P-9 strike and asks for injunctive relief from the imposition of a trusteeship...

...The key ingredient in the strike is, however, the determination that has been fostered in P-9...

...No tape recorders or cameras were allowed inside the room, and the press was barred as well...

...There was a logic to that record...

...THE UFCW HAS NOT, however, been content to makes its case and then let P-9 stand or fall by a militancy it disapproves of...

...They still must battle temperatures that in parts of the plant go as low as 38 degrees...

...The crowd (300) will let the police and deputies (35 at most) make the arrests, and they in turn will be very careful in removing the strikers who have wedged themselves between their locked cars and the Hormel gates...

...The 291 company, which has worked hard for brandname recognition, is vulnerable to the kind of boycott the United Farm Workers achieved with California grapes and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers achieved against J. P Stevens...

...On one side stand the leaders of the 1.3 million member UFCW, who believe P-9 should have signed the concessionary contract they negotiated with Hormel in 287 1984 on behalf of seven other locals...

...It was designed for the equipment, not the people," Kermit Thomas, a 38year veteran of Austin's Hormel operations, insists, and P-9's analysis of Hormel's records backs him up...

...If concessions are going to stop, then they are going to have to stop at the most profitable company with the newest plant...

...P-9 workers and their families have formed a United Support Group that not only distributes leaflets at other Hormel plants but tours the country talking about the Hormel strike...

...They arrive long before the Austin police and the Mower County sheriff's deputies or the workers on the 6 a.m...

...The UFCW's determination to take these steps was in evidence early in the spring, when Lewie Anderson said of P-9, "The strike is lost...

...Although the UFCW never did mount an organizing drive against ConAgra/Armour, it refused to support the P-9 corporate campaign against First Bank Systems, which holds Hormel stock and is represented on its board of directors...

...The need to go it alone has, however, forced P-9 to be resourceful in ways it might not otherwise have been...

...Its Dinty Moore stew has a 70-percent share of the canned stew market...

...The P-9 strikers believe they have a sound strategy that is hurting Hormel...

...What P-9 got in return were job guarantees and a contractual pledge that wages in the new plant would not be lower than those in the old...

...It is easy to see why Lewie Anderson fears that the end result of the strike could be a nonunion plant in Austin...

...Despite the UFCW leadership, there has also been support for P-9 from within the UFCW chain...

...Under a trusteeship the UFCW could also go to Austin and renew negotiations on the terms P-9 opposes...

...They also agreed to a seven-year, no-strike contract and a 20 percent speedup in production at the new plant...