There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  HORMEL FOODS, famous for its Spam, Wrangler Sausages, and Dinty Moore Beef Stew, was one of the country’s best-known manufacturers of supermarket canned meats. Its plant in the small southeast Minnesota city of Austin, started as a family business in 1891, had by 1984 come to employ sixteen hundred men and women; other Hormel slaughtering and manufacturing facilities opened elsewhere in the Upper Midwest. The firm built a new $100 million factory in Austin in the early 1980s, which, operating at full capacity, slaughtered 2 million hogs each year and produced 440 cans of Spam per minute; by 1985 Hormel provided a livelihood directly or indirectly for a quarter of the town’s twenty-three thousand inhabitants. The founder, George A. Hormel, and his son, Jay, had worked to make the company a trusted community institution; it was a source of pride that the company’s workers, foremen, executives, and their families sat side by side at church suppers and PTA meetings, watched their sons play Little League baseball together, and exchanged greetings at the gas pump.

  After the new plant opened, however, workers sensed a change in the company’s demeanor, as a corps of professional leadership filled the top positions and a stricter work environment took hold, with greater demands on efficiency and production. The company also began attending more seriously to its bottom line; in 1985 it announced it would seek concessions from the Austin-based Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in the form of a reduction of the average wage at the plant, from $10.69 per hour down to $8.25. The step was necessary, management explained, in order for Hormel to stay competitive with other regional meatpacking plants that were nonunion and paid their employees as little as $6.00 an hour.

  Local P-9 members took the news as an affront, as it was rumored Hormel’s profits were still solid. When talks between Hormel and the national UFCW proved fruitless, P-9 hired a controversial New York labor consultant, Ray Rogers. Nicknamed “the Muscleman of Labor” for his daily weight-lifting regimen, Rogers had the youthful good looks of a freshman congressman and was known to play by his own rules. He had become identified with a new strategy of labor resistance called the “corporate campaign,” which was designed to unnerve employers by exposing their corporate profile—their finances and anything potentially humiliating about their partnerships, investments, or stockholders. Rogers had grown up in a blue-collar family in coastal Massachusetts and was a veteran labor activist, having joined VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, right out of college in 1967 and served in Appalachia. Following the triple homicide in 1969 that took the lives of UMW leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter on the order of miners’ president Anthony “Tough Tony” Boyle, Rogers had helped union reformer Arnold Miller and others within the UMW to expel Boyle, who along with three other men went to prison for their roles in the crime. Rogers was also involved in the lengthy North Carolina textile workers’ campaign against J. P. Stevens & Co. that inspired Norma Rae, the popular 1979 Hollywood film starring Sally Fields.

  P-9’s bringing of so aggressive a labor advocate into a stoic heartland community like Austin was questioned at the Washington headquarters of the UFCW, which opposed Rogers’s style of confrontation because it appeared to leave employers no room for compromise; the UFCW also worried that if Austin’s workers failed to take seriously the concessions Hormel asked—the kinds manufacturers were demanding all across the country—they would resist themselves right out of their jobs. As for the residents of Austin, many were made uncomfortable by the fact that, seemingly through Rogers’s influence, the standoff between P-9 and Hormel soon took on a nasty edge, neighbor siding against neighbor. A small embattled meatpacking local waging a lonely fight for worker dignity against a food industry Goliath made a good story, however, and attracted national media attention and wider labor movement support, even as it prompted concern that P-9’s president, James Guyette, and other union leaders would become mesmerized by the spotlight and lose perspective. This fear seemed to be confirmed when Hormel offered to raise the reduced wage to as high as $10 an hour, in the eyes of many observers a reasonable compromise, and P-9’s members, disregarding the advice of the national UFCW, rejected it by a vote of 775–540.79

  After the strike began on August 17, 1985, management kept the plant running at a minimal production level through the fall using supervisory staff. In January 1986, however, frustrated with the impasse, Hormel announced it would reopen at full production, offering any workers who chose to return the $10-per-hour wage and $8 to new hires. This caused immediate friction among the townspeople, for while there was considerable loyalty to P-9 in Austin, there were also a large number of people eager for work. “If the President of the United States can replace strikers,” noted one observer of the Hormel crisis, “this must be socially acceptable, politically acceptable, and we can do it, also.”80 About two thousand men and women applied for the $8-an-hour jobs. Distressing scenes occurred at the plant gates as infuriated strikers challenged their would-be replacements, many of whom they recognized as friends, neighbors, even relatives; there were shouting matches and cries of “Shame!” and “Scab!” At one point strikers blocked the plant entrance with their automobiles, briefly forcing Hormel to shut down and leading Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich to dispatch the National Guard.

  The P-9 strikers hunkered down in the face of intensified opposition. Exhibiting a degree of militancy reminiscent of the UAW sit-downers of 1937, the P-9 workers kept themselves and their families together with organized food drives, pooled child care duties, the sharing of meals, and even the free exchange of services such as auto repair. But the cause was not free of dissent. Some members concluded independently that P-9’s position was hopeless and returned to their jobs; others, remaining loyal to the union, nonetheless began to question whether it made sense to prolong a strike that increasingly appeared unwinnable. Townspeople upset at the upheaval the strike had created accused Rogers of being a charlatan and Guyette of having succumbed to the glare of momentary national fame; both of them, it was feared, shared a messiah complex and were willing to go down in glorious defeat for the sake of some vague labor movement martyrdom. The Austin city council weighed in, urging P-9 to end the strike “before this town is destroyed.”81

  Although Rogers, Guyette, and others were buoyed by the support of countless activists from across the country, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who came to Austin, the leadership of the country’s mainstream labor movement concurred with the UFCW that continuing the strike would be a mistake; in disregarding others’ well-meant advice, it seemed, P-9 was acting as a renegade union. When in late February 1986 Guyette and a small group of colleagues traveled to the AFL-CIO annual meeting in Bal Harbour, Florida, they received a chilly reception from Lane Kirkland and other officials. Guyette made an uncomfortable situation worse by telling reporters that AFL-CIO leaders were out of touch with America’s workers and that “we feel confident that we can win with the support of the labor movement who is not down here in Bal Harbour out on the golf course or in the jewelry shops.” UFCW official Lewie Anderson scolded Guyette for taking a cheap shot at the nation’s labor leaders, saying, “Clearly they’ve lost the strike, it’s a colossal failure”; Anderson suggested that at a time when organized labor generally was under attack, it was a pity that P-9’s leaders were “going around saying such horrible things.”82 P-9 warned the AFL-CIO that the defeat of the Hormel strikers would stand, like PATCO, as a traumatic loss for all of organized labor, but Kirkland’s reaction was to endorse a UFCW statement depicting Austin as “a story of inexperienced, misguided leadership and false prophets.”83

  The UFCW’s irritation grew substantially when P-9 began orchestrating demonstrations and encouraging work stoppages at other Hormel facilities in the Midwest, and Rogers led demonstrations in Austin at First Bank, which he deemed “the real power structure” behind Hormel, urging workers to withdraw their accounts. UFCW president William Wynn meanwhile advised his union’s workers at Hormel sites across the country not to become �
��innocent victims of Local P-9’s extremist actions.” Criticizing P-9’s all-or-nothing approach as “mass suicide,” Wynn complained that “[Ray] Rogers has anointed himself the Ayatollah of Austin and is making hostages of our members at other Hormel plants.”84 Rogers retaliated by characterizing Wynn as complacent and out of touch with workingmen and -women, calling him “one of the most anti-union people I have ever come across.”85 The New York Times concurred with Wynn’s assessment, however, terming the Hormel strike a “sad and highly publicized failure … less a labor action than a defiant shaking of fists at large economic forces.”86 The relationship between the Austin local and its national parent became so strained it began to appear the UFCW likely shared Hormel’s interest in crushing the strike. Hormel meanwhile had filed charges against P-9 with the NLRB and obtained an injunction against picketing outside the Austin plant; it was an alleged violation of this injunction that led to the arrest of twenty-seven individuals, including Ray Rogers.87

  The UFCW, its own credibility on the line, eventually placed Local P-9 into receivership and ceased making strike payments of between $40–$65 per week to each worker. Now at least formally in charge of the wayward local, it gave one final directive to P-9 to suspend the strike, which was ignored, at which point the UFCW fired both Guyette and Rogers. The strike thus officially ended with the remaining nine hundred strikers out of their jobs, their positions having been filled by replacements.

  The Hormel strike had become, as its own leaders knew, a largely symbolic act, an expression of anger at the corporate diminishment of workers’ status and at labor’s weakness before demands for employee concessions. Hormel, an historically benign employer up against new competitive forces—global markets, faster means of transport, and the availability of cheap labor—had encountered a group of workers unwilling to suffer the effects of that transition. The strikers of P-9, in embracing principle, rejected the retreat culture of labor in the post-PATCO era, and paid the price.

  THE LESSON OF THE PATCO AND HORMEL STRIKES—that a large employer could effectively, and with little public or official disapproval, replace its workforce—was not lost on employees at Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, located in Peoria, Illinois. Caterpillar’s arrival in the Peoria-Decatur region in the 1950s had proven a significant economic boon to rural central Illinois. By the late 1980s, however, after decades of steady growth, the firm’s profits declined, and by 1991 it had sliced its workforce, leaving only twelve thousand workers, down from twenty thousand in 1980. “The Cat” blamed some of its problems on the fact that it was now selling as much as 59 percent of its equipment overseas, where it found itself in fierce competition with the Japanese equipment-maker Komatsu Ltd. To better direct the struggle, Caterpillar in 1990 selected Don Fites, a veteran salesman, to be its CEO. Fites had spent many years selling for Caterpillar in Japan, and his global perspective and experience were expected to be a key asset in keeping the firm in the race with Komatsu. Fites was known to admire the way Japanese companies managed to dominate their labor unions.

  In 1991 the firm sought a new six-year contract with its workers, who were represented by the UAW. One bit of belt-tightening the company proposed was to cease paying guards and janitors the $17.00 an hour wage it paid more skilled workers; it also sought a lower pay tier of $8.50 an hour for new hires. The contract offer, which covered a longer term than any previous pact, held out no pay increases to unskilled workers, only cost-of-living adjustments, and failed to renew a guarantee the company had with the UAW to keep a minimum number of workers on salary. More fundamentally, in proposing this new contract Caterpillar was announcing its wish to depart from the more traditional negotiation the UAW preferred, known as pattern bargaining, in which a union emulates a contract negotiated by workers at a similar enterprise, in this case Deere & Company, another large Midwestern farm implement manufacturer.

  “Pattern bargaining is an outdated concept that makes no sense in a global economy,” opined Gerald S. Flaherty, a Caterpillar vice president. “We need an agreement that makes sense for our employees and enables Caterpillar to continue providing high-quality jobs here in the United States. We also need an agreement that will allow us to sell products against non–United States competitors around the world.”88 The UAW had its own agenda: it wanted to safeguard pattern bargaining as a favored method of labor negotiations for possible use in upcoming talks with the Big Three automakers, which employed four hundred thousand UAW members.

  The talks that commenced between Caterpillar and the UAW, stricken by disagreement about what form they should take, predictably went nowhere. When UAW members walked off at some Caterpillar facilities, the firm locked out employees at several others. Continuing efforts to restart discussions proved futile, and in April 1992 the company informed the strikers they must return in a week or lose their jobs, as it had already begun advertising for new hires. This threat was more serious at Caterpillar than at other employers because many of the company’s workers were in their forties, and their chances of finding comparable employment in a depressed economy were slim. The unfavorable condition of the regional economy also meant that the firm would have no trouble finding applicants eager to apply for any replacement jobs; indeed, the company reported having received forty thousand responses about available jobs from across the country almost overnight. Faced with the near-certain loss of their jobs and with no progress in sight in the negotiations, the UAW froze their strike and ordered its members back to work. “Who’s next?” a UAW officer complained to a reporter. “If they can do it at Caterpillar, what’s going to stop Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler from doing it to us?”89

  In one sense the predicament at Caterpillar was a worse sign for U.S. labor than Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers a decade earlier. Not much love was lost between the government and the controllers, but Caterpillar was a regional anchor employer with deep roots in the community; there was something disturbing about its willingness to use scabs to oust the union with whom it had a long relationship, essentially tossing its veteran workforce out in the cold. Labor officials viewed it as a new low in corporate disloyalty, UAW president Owen Bieber decrying the idea that Caterpillar had no choice in the matter. “I’m getting a little sick of hearing the word ‘global,’ ” he told the Detroit Economic Club. “Simply put, Caterpillar’s anti-worker, anti-union takeaway strategy is a crime of domestic opportunity—not a legitimate struggle over global economic survival.”90

  Bieber was correct that Caterpillar saw the use of replacements less as a temporary fix and more as part of a long-term adaptation. That year the firm had joined two hundred other companies to create the Alliance to Keep Americans Working, whose first order of business was to defeat a bill working its way through Congress that would reverse the NLRB’s ruling in Harter Equipment and ban the use of replacement workers in a lockout. In that 1986 case, which involved the Harter Equipment Company of New Jersey, the NLRB had ruled that employers who locked out striking workers could hire replacements in order to keep their businesses running, so long as there was no evidence of “anti-union motivation.” Critics charged that such a right given to employers inherently defied workers’ rights, since it rendered useless the threat of a strike. Labor had put up only a halfhearted effort to win support for the bill, thinking it stood little chance because President George H. W. Bush had threatened to veto it; in the end the legislation cleared the House but fell short in the Senate. “Within the AFL-CIO, serious misgivings had been expressed about risking organized labor’s already beaten-down image in another losing battle,” according to historian Stephen Franklin. “Organized labor did not do well in Congress, and had not won a major legislative battle in years. Stuck in its downward spiral … its defeat [in the replacement bill] was a self-fulfilled prophecy.”91

  Advocates for the legislation tried again early in Bill Clinton’s first term, buffing up the image of what had been called the Striker Replace
ment Bill by renaming it the Workplace Fairness Bill, and later, after the death of the legendary farmworkers’ leader in April 1993, the César Chávez Workplace Fairness Bill. Senator Edward Kennedy told his colleagues that most industrialized countries did not allow the hiring of replacement workers, and Representative Major Owens of Brooklyn defended the bill as essential to labor because “if you can be replaced, you don’t have the right to strike.” Republicans such as Senator Nancy Kassenbaum, however, complained that unless workers know they might lose their jobs to replacements, “there is little incentive for labor to make demands that are reasonable and reflect market realities.” The legislation survived labor committees in both houses of Congress and passed in the House, but once again failed to garner enough votes in the Senate to overcome the Republicans’ 60-vote filibuster.92