AUSTIN, Minn. — Negotiations between Hormel Foods and 1,700 meat-packer employees have entered a crisis stage. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents 1,700 employees, said its members have voted overwhelmingly to reject what Hormel had called its final offer. The union didn’t release details on what it meant “overwhelming.” Both sides have agreed, however, to extend negotiations to October 8. The union claims the company is in a good position to share its extraordinary recent revenue with workers. The company had $2.1 billion gross profits over the past year.
Hormel labor history
A strike against Hirmel in1985 lasted 16 months — one of the longest and most bitter in Minnesota history. The strike became a sociological case study pn how a strike can fracture a community into warring factions with long-time scarring. Barbara Kopple’s 1999 documentary ‘American Dream” won an Academy award. Playwright Philip Dawkins’s 2020 “Spamtown, USA” chronicled the misery the strike caused on children. On a broader scale, the strike symbolized the nationally organized corporate drive that followed in the 1990s to break the labor movement after a century of growth. In the end, the Hormel workers’ strike failed when the parent union backed away from supporting the local Austin unit.
Could it happen again?
Reporter Bill Strande of television station KARE asked two scholars for their analysis:
> Dave Vang, a finance professor of finance at the University of St. Thomas, doesn’t see a repeat disaster for Hormel workers: “Given what happened last time in the ’80s, I think there’s going to be a tremendous amount of resistance on the part of the union to even allow that to happen,” said Vang. He noted, though, that the price of Hormel’s signature product Spam, as well as meats in general, might go up. He said also tat some farmers may find “a little bit of disruption in trying to find someone who’s going to take their cattle for slaughter.”
> Peter Rachleff, a retired historian at Macalester College who wrote a book on the 1980s strikes, doesn’t think the union will be influenced by the past. “It’s in a sense, a new union,” said Rachleff. “This is a completely different workforce.”
In the library
> Dave Hage: “No Retreat, No Surrender: Labor’s War at Hormel,” 398 pages, 1986.
> Fred Halstead: “The1985-1986 Hormel Meat-Packers Strike in Austin, Minnesota,” 44 pages, 1989.
> Peter Rachleff: “Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement,” 144 pages, 1999.