Indigenous Music

...There are also issues of safety on the job but, said the Times man, "most of all, there is a dignity issue in this strike...

...Whatever other developments have taken place by the time you read this, I think Serrin is right in refusing to predict how this will all come out, "although it looks like they've lost...

...Oh tell me if you can./Will you be a dirty scab/ Or will you be women and men...

...Both are still [consultants to] the poor Hormel Company, and immune as Hormel to any criticism by the national United Food and Commercial Workers...

...Organized labor's leaders are supposed to be concerned with the seniority system, right...

...It ain't over yet...

...Hormel employs "consultants" who include, Laney reports: "Mr...

...And, of course, "Solidarity Forever...

...All proceeds from this cassette go to P-9's Adopt-a-Family program to help those on strike make payments on their homes and take care of bills for utilities and medical needs...

...The cassette is $10, including tax...

...Paul, Minnesota, provides further background to explain the anger of the Hormel strikers and the singers on the Boycott Hormel cassette...

...Outside the union hall, some of the members of P-9 were waiting for their trustees with baseball bats...

...Some news you didn't see in the newspapers or on the nightly television news: "The unemployment department in Mason City, Iowa, made the people that was on unemployment down there come up to Austin, Minnesota, and apply for jobs there [at Hormel] or else they would cut their benefits off...

...A striker's wife writes a letter to Labor Notes: "Spring is coming soon so it won't be so cold at 4 in the morning...

...For information on how to get it, Larry Long is at Box 9601, Minneapolis, MN 55440...

...And on the cassette, two women, with voices of steel and the beat of a firestorm, sing, unaccompanied, "You can't just take my dreams away—not with me watching...

...The Hormel strike lays it out clear: The chairman of Hormel is now making $570,000 a year, and the parent union of the strikers, betraying them, bailed him out...

...The source of that information is a striking member of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Austin...

...On May 8, their parent union announced it would take over Local P-9 and put it in trusteeship until the strikers wised up and went back to work...

...We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old/And the union makes us strong...

...It should be distributed at every AFL-CIO Executive Committee meeting, but that's like expecting Edwin Meese to circulate in the Justice Department Louis Brandeis's dissents on wiretapping and entrapment...

...Well, maybe not a whole new world, but some sustained worker pressure to roll back some of the givebacks and bust some of the union-busting law firms...

...Martin Garden, a union buster from the Twin Cities...

...Labor Notes, by the way, is a good source for news of what's happening among the rank and file around the country...

...On National Public Radio, William Serrin, who covers labor for The New York Times, said the Hormel strikers have some solid points on their side, even though their parent union has turned against them...

...A further measure of the distance between national labor "leadership" and the P-9 workers on the picket line is given on the closing track of the cassette, "Solidarity Forever," sung with an exhilarating determination I haven't heard for years...

...Oh, workers, can you stand it...

...Can you imagine anyone in the rank and file anywhere writing a song for Lane Kirkland—a song he'd let into his house...

...That "tenacity"—which can also be defined as strength of conviction—comes through like a swinging brass band on the cassette, both in the narratives and in the music...

...Also regenerated from labor's singing heritage (long since forgotten in the AFL-CIO Executive Committee) are such lines as "I'm stickin' to the union/Until the battle's won...

...Can you imagine most of the leadership of the AFL-CIO standing there and joining in...

...Another address for information is Adopt-a-P-9-Family Fund, 316 NE 4th Avenue, Austin, MN 55912...

...The cassette is called Boycott Hormel/Livefrom Austin...

...Garden is notorious for breaking seven printing shops in the Twin Cities two years ago...

...The proud, penetrating women's voices, for instance, on the venerable picket-line song, "Which Side Are You On...

...On the cassette, a Hormel striker tells how management had "gutted" the seniority system at the plant—before the strike...

...And as for all this talk about how the country's changing and that's why labor keeps losing members, well, that's not it...

...They can put you where they want to when they want to...

...They made concessions," said Serrin, who apparently has more freedom on the air than at The Times, "and then the company came back and asked for more concessions...

...10 a year from P.O...

...In correspondence about the Hormel strike in Labor Notes, Thomas J. Laney, president of UAW Local 879 in St...

...Kru-kowski's agitational record includes the Milwaukee Master Lock Strike three years ago where UAW members battled Milwaukee police in the streets before a contract was reached...

...It's a sixty-minute-long witness to the fact that new songs are coming out of the labor movement—not from Lane Kirk-land's office in Washington but down where people are actually on the lines...

...Some scabs aren't born...

...Which side is Lane Kirkland on...

...Serrin talked about the remarkable "tenacity" of the strikers, and that's an understatement...

...Says a striker on the Boycott Hormel/ Live from Austin cassette: "Before we went out, if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you would have to raise your hand, and that's no dignity...

...they're made...

...Box 20001, Detroit, MI 48220...

...Tom Krukowski, a union buster from Milwaukee, and Mr...

...His testimony about what's been happening at Hormel is part of an array of song and story about the strike produced on cassette by folksingers Larry Long and Carrie Ger-endasy...