Prolonged Hormel Strike: A Small-Town Civil War

The aging union hall is packed for one more solidarity meeting, deep into another cold and blustery night on the plains of southern Minnesota.

Hundreds of battle-weary and cash-poor striking workers from the Geo. A. Hormel Co. meatpacking plant a few blocks away have huddled here to buck up their collective spirit as their walkout grinds through its seventh desperate month.

One after another, militant members selected by the union to tour the country and drum up support for the cause rise to tell their brethren how warmly they have been received by unions all across America, how their boycott of Hormel products is spreading and how their travels have convinced them that their cause ultimately will triumph.

But in the back of the room, 34-year-old Teresa Landherr is quietly talking, not of national labor brotherhood, but of disloyalty and back-stabbing right here in Austin on the part of her real brother, 31-year-old Jerry Rickerl. While she was being arrested for blocking the gates to Hormel’s corporate headquarters here, he had defected, become a strikebreaker. Suddenly, a well-loved brother had become an unfaithful scab.

“My husband and I called him the night we found out he was going back to work, and he said he had to cross the picket lines to save his house,” says Landherr, a pale, wraith-thin mother of two who has suffered permanent damage to her wrists from swinging the heavy knives used to bone pork shoulders on the Hormel assembly line. “And my husband says to him: ‘You think your house is more important than our kids?’

“You’ve got to understand--we’re fighting to save ourselves here. So we haven’t talked to him since, and I doubt we will talk to him again for a very long time. I really don’t know how I can ever forgive my brother.”

She is not alone. All over town, the strike has set family against family, husband against wife and brother against brother.

Until last Aug. 17, when 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union went on strike to protest the plant’s poor safety record and Hormel’s demands for steep wage concessions, Austin was a close-knit, all-white, one-high-school town of 23,000 where extended families were still intact and friendships lasted lifetimes.

Invariably, when two people met on the street, they were related or went to school and church together or knew each other from work. And that work almost always was in Hormel’s massive pork-slaughtering and processing operation, which has dominated the town and its economy since the 19th Century. In many cases, co-workers at Hormel were also brothers, sisters, sons and fathers; everyone in Austin grew up thinking of Hormel as a benignly paternalistic and family-oriented company.

Troops Called Out

Then the strike, the first at Hormel’s Austin plant in 50 years, changed all that. The stark town has become the scene of one of the most contentious and highly publicized labor disputes in recent American history, and Austin is paying the price.

In fact, Austin has taken on a Depression-era quality. Tensions in town have run so high that in January, Gov. Rudy Perpich was forced to call out 800 troops from the Minnesota National Guard to control the crowds of strikers attempting to keep Hormel from reopening the plant with non-union workers, and the Guard had to stay in town for nearly a month before things calmed down.

More recently, 115 strikers were arrested when the union blockaded the entrance to Hormel’s corporate offices on March 10, and another 24 were arrested for trying to block the factory’s gates last Thursday.

The protests also have spilled over from the picket lines into the rest of the community. Most dramatically, at midday on Feb. 21, children of the striking workers walked out of the junior and senior high schools and staged a march around town in support of their parents’ cause. Later, about 50 students demonstrated outside the jail after their parents were arrested for blocking the Hormel headquarters.

Even Austin’s City Council meetings have been disrupted by the strike. Mayor Tom Kough is also a Hormel employee on strike, and two other council members have crossed the picket lines. One January council meeting was hastily adjourned after P-9 members jammed the hall to hurl epithets at the two strikebreakers.

Threats to Managers

Telephoned threats and other harassments of Hormel’s non-union workers and managers have also worsened conditions in Austin. Plant manager Deryl Arnold, who says he has “tried very hard not to let the strike affect my family or my personal life,” says that, nonetheless, he and his family have received serious threats and have been harassed when they have gone out in public.

Worst of all, financially strapped families are being ripped apart as close relatives choose between Hormel and P-9. Divorce has proliferated as husbands and wives split over how to put bread on the table. And, as in any civil war, the wounds from this seemingly endless strike have been all the deeper because they have been inflicted by loved ones.

“If I saw my brother on the street today, I don’t think I’d even look at him,” says R. J. Bergstrom. His brother, Ron Bergstrom, a longtime P-9 member, crossed the picket lines soon after Hormel reopened its plant with replacement employees in January. “My mother told me, ‘why don’t you go back and get your job? Think of your family,’ ” said Bergstrom, who has three children and is having trouble making ends meet. “I told her ‘one scab in the family is enough.’ ”

Bergstrom admits that the financial pressures on union members are almost unbearable, especially since the devastating slump in the farming economy means that other jobs are hard to come by in rural Minnesota. Still, he has little sympathy for the weak-willed.

“My mother-in-law told me I was a damn fool if I didn’t go back, but there’s just something about that word--scab--that turns your stomach. We’re holding out yet.”

Jay Evenson’s family has been split down the middle. His older brother, Chris, broke ranks with the union to return to work, and then persuaded their younger brother, Marty, to join him as a newly hired strikebreaker. Meanwhile, Jay, his sister, Lisa, and two of his brothers-in-law have stayed out on strike. To make matters worse, Jay’s father supports his brothers, while his mother is on the side of the strikers. “It’s pretty much divided our family,” Jay says.

A Family Divided

Chris keeps calling Jay to try to patch things up, and has invited Jay and his wife over for dinner, but Jay has refused. Jay also says that he will not go to his niece’s birthday party. He is sure he would only get into an argument with her father, Chris. “We’ll just send a card,” Jay says.

“My dad says family is family and work is work, and to bury the hatchet,” he adds. “But there are too many people, like my brother, playing with families’ lives. I say what my brother did was for greed.”

The battle has dragged on for so long now that many in town believe that Austin will be divided for years, even after the strike ends.

“I’d like to say these people would be able to coexist, but I don’t see any way around the bitterness and divisiveness this is causing,” says Bruce Lindquist, managing editor of the Austin Daily Herald. “These families go back three generations of working at Hormel and being in the union, and crossing a picket line is something they’ve been taught that you don’t do,” he adds. “Unfortunately, some of them put that before their own families. I personally know of at least four divorces that are directly the result of this strike.”

The personal bitterness and family rifts appear to have become deepest just as the strike appears lost and the union’s cause hopeless. And Local P-9’s leaders, as much at odds with their international union as with Hormel management, also have become more militant. They have resorted to more radical tactics, under the direction of an outside labor organizer, as their chance of negotiating a new contract on anything but the company’s terms becomes increasingly remote.

In fact, Hormel executives are now acting as if the strike is over. Since the plant, which is by far Hormel’s largest, was reopened on Jan. 13, company officials say they have completely replaced the old work force with non-union employees--including between 400 and 500 former P-9 members who have crossed the picket lines.

Hormel’s Arnold warns that there are no jobs left for the 900 to 1,000 P-9 members who have stayed out on strike. (About 100 P-9 members have given up and moved away.) Although the plant now employs only 1,025 people--400 to 500 fewer than before the strike--Arnold says that the reduced staffing will eventually allow Hormel to run the highly automated facility more efficiently.

Production Rise Seen

And, while Arnold concedes that production is still well below pre-strike levels, he predicts that the plant’s output will approach its former level within five or six weeks.

“We have ample people on our payroll now to man the jobs we have,” Arnold said.

The company has consistently refused to compromise in its contract talks with the union. It has demanded that P-9 accept more or less the same wage concessions and other contract provisions obtained from union workers at other plants. The local has been willing to compromise, but so far has refused to capitulate and accept Hormel’s terms. Infrequent bargaining sessions have failed to break the deadlock, and there is no end to the strike in sight.

The international union believes that Local P-9’s leadership has lost touch with reality by carrying on the strike long after its leverage with the company was lost.

“There is no question that this is a lost strike,” says Jay Foreman, executive vice president of the Washington-based United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local P-9’s parent organization. “The local just has not had the leadership that could calculate when and where a bargain could have been struck, and now they have missed their chance.

“Now, the only thing they can realistically bargain for is to get their jobs back. And when you are bargaining to get back the jobs you started with, then I’d call that a lost strike.”

Earlier this month, the international union finally revoked its sanctioning of the strike. Strike pay to Local P-9 members was ended. Top union officials now would like to intercede in the dispute, to get Hormel to promise to rehire more of the strikers in return for the local’s accepting further compromise on contract issues.

But the parent union still cannot bargain on behalf of P-9, and the local’s members, angered by the parent union’s decision to abandon their strike, voted on March 16 to rescind an earlier vote in favor of asking the local’s leadership to patch up its differences with the international.

Today, Local P-9’s leadership is more committed than ever to the strike. “This is a fight for the American standard of living,” says Jim Guyette, president of Local P-9. “People here are only asking for what they made eight years ago from a company that reported record profits last year.”

Guyette maintains that the strike will slowly grind Hormel down and force it to give in to the union. He says that the company is still operating the Austin plant at 10% of its pre-strike capacity because it lacks experienced workers, and he says that the union’s call for a nationwide boycott of Hormel products is starting to have an impact on the company. “We’re continuing to escalate, we’re continuing to move forward,” he said.

Hired Organizer’s View

Ray Rogers, a controversial labor organizer hired by Local P-9, adds: “I wouldn’t be working so hard if I thought the strike was lost.” He charges that the local would have won already if the international had not decided to support the company.

Most people in Austin have heard all the rhetoric from both the company and the union dozens of times, and are just plain fed up. They want the two sides to settle and get the strike over with. Already, a major chain has put off a decision to build a motel in Austin because of the strike, and residents are worried the dispute will have a lasting impact on the town’s economy and reputation.

“The strike has cost a lot of businesses a lot of money, and the downtown is getting kind of sparse,” complains Ann Dieser, a college student who works as a waitress.

“Everybody is getting pretty tired of the strike--it’s dragged on so long. People just want it to end.”