Doggedly Fight for Their Jobs : Fired Hormel Co. Strikers Seek Support of AFL-CIO
A dogged group of Minnesota meatpackers came to this sunny resort city Sunday to remind the leaders of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, that their highly publicized struggle against Geo. A. Hormel & Co. is not over.
The three dozen Austin, Minn., packers who came here are among the 850 members of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers who have not gotten their jobs back since a bitter, occasionally violent strike formally ended last March. Another 550 Hormel workers in four other cities who observed roving picket lines set up at their plants were fired, too, and have not regained their jobs.
“I’m trying to wake the labor movement up,” said Merle Krueger, 59, a 40-year veteran of the Austin plant as he stood in the Sheraton Hotel lobby here, one day before the annual winter meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, handing out leaflets urging a boycott of Hormel products.
The Austin strikers, some accompanied by their wives, paid for their trip here with money raised by those sympathetic to their plight. They are staying with members of labor unions who live in this area.
Jim Guyette, former president of P-9, who was stripped of his position when the international union took over last April, said members of the local will spend the week here talking to any labor leaders they can corral. “We’ll be by the swimming pool, in the bars, wherever they’ll be.”
The unemployed workers gathered in the Sheraton lobby Sunday morning, many wearing blue and gold T-shirts emblazoned with barbed references to Hormel’s products. Sunday, they restated charges first made last year that the leadership of the United Food and Commercial Workers had undermined their efforts to win the seven-month-long strike.
‘Left Out in the Cold’
Merlin Christensen, a P-9 striker whose T-shirt proclaimed “union solidarity,” declared: “The UFCW left us out in the cold. The scabs who crossed the picket line are in the plant working, while the true union men are out on the streets.”
Krueger and his wife and other unemployed Hormel workers have been driving from city to city, attempting to drum up interest for a boycott of Hormel and to maintain a “solidarity network” that was forged during the strike.
The workers called on AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to investigate the situation and urged that he come to Austin, where numerous strikers have lost their homes, and see how they are living. It seems unlikely that Kirkland will go to Austin, however. Last year, he expressed support for the way the international union had handled the strike.
Heated Debate Continues
Although the strike was formally settled last August, the way it was conducted continues to be a subject of heated debate in the labor movement. About 1,500 workers struck on Aug. 17, 1985, protesting wage cuts, proposed changes in the seniority system, poor safety conditions in the plant and other issues. They also attempted to strengthen their hand by putting pressure on a Minnesota bank that had longstanding ties to Hormel, a strategy designed by Ray Rogers, a New York-based labor consultant hired by Local P-9 over the objections of the international union.
Supporters of the Austin strikers assert that they waged a militant battle that was an inspiration to workers across the country, who are resisting employer demands for concessions. But critics contend that the strike was misguided and resulted in veteran workers’ losing jobs that they may never regain. Food and Commercial Workers President William Wynn called the strike “suicidal” last year, some months after initially sanctioning it.
Plant Shut 5 Months
The strike caused the plant to shut down for nearly five months. But after it reopened in January, 1986, about 550 striking employees went back to work and the company hired 550 replacement workers.
Wynn concluded that the plant would go non-union if the strike was not ended, so he ordered local leaders to call it off. When they refused, he obtained a federal court order permitting the international to take over the local last June. Last August, the strike was formally settled, with wages to be raised to $10.70 an hour by 1989, $1.45 an hour higher than at the start of the strike but only a penny an hour above the 1979 wage.
The settlement provided no guarantee that the 850 remaining strikers would get their jobs back, prompting former local President Guyette to charge that Wynn had “sold out” some of his most vigilant members, a charge he repeated here Sunday. “We can’t allow the international to victimize their own people,” he said.
Wynn said he hopes that in time, all the Hormel workers will regain their jobs. “I would have liked it to be done by now,” he said in an interview here. He stressed that the company had the legal right to permanently replace strikers.
Strategist Criticized
International leaders have been critical of Guyette but even more so of labor strategist Rogers, dubbing him “the Ayatollah of Austin.” Wynn charged here that Rogers was responsible for the 850 Austin workers’ losing their jobs, a charge Rogers said is totally unjustified.
Disputes of this kind usually diminish over time but this one will not fade away soon, the Austin strikers insisted here Sunday.
“This fight will not end until we get back to work with a good contract,” said Floyd Lennoch, who worked for Hormel in Austin from 1947 until the strike began.
Lennoch said he was particularly outraged that the international union had settled the strike on terms that protected the jobs only of individuals who had broken the strike, not those who had held out for seven months.
