Local 9, Packinghouse Workers

LOCAL 9, PACKINGHOUSE WORKERS. Representing workers at the George A. Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, Packinghouse Workers Local 9—familiarly referred to as Local P-9—occupies an important place in twentieth-century labor history. In the 1930s Austin unionists played a major role in the organization of Midwestern packinghouses. First in the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW), and later as part of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Austin activists helped packinghouse workers form viable unions across the Upper Midwest. More recently, Local 9 (now affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers) emerged at the forefront of the nationwide fight against concessions. Spurred by wage cuts and new managerial policies, Hormel workers engaged in a protracted but ultimately unsuccessful strike in 1985–1986. Despite its defeat, the strike was significant, for it was carried on in open defiance of the international union and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

The IUAW emerged suddenly in the summer of 1933, following a brief work stoppage in the hog-killing department at the Hormel plant. Organized by Frank Ellis, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the fledgling union gained recognition after a successful sit-down strike in November 1933. Influenced by the IWW’s “One Big Union” concept, the IUAW quickly expanded beyond the Hormel packinghouse. In Austin and in the nearby town of Albert Lea, the IUAW organized workers in restaurants, taverns, hotels, garages, retail stores, dairies, lumberyards, and small factories. Much of this expansion was sparked by Eva Sauer, a retail clerk who became a full-time IUAW organizer in 1934. Using demonstrations, strikes, consumer boycotts, and, when necessary, the massive presence of unionists from the Hormel plant, the IUAW built a solid regional organization within a few short years.

Although its organizing activities were broad ranging, the outstanding feature of the IUAW was its effort to assist packinghouse workers in the formation of unions elsewhere in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Constrained by limited funds and ferocious resistance by the packing companies, these efforts met with only partial success. Nonetheless, the nuclei created by the IUAW in many midwestern plants provided the entrée for the CIO when it moved into the meat-packing industry in 1937. Moreover, the IUAW’s activities left an indelible mark on the character of packinghouse unionism. The industrial unions they helped found derived their strength from rank-and-file mobilization and powerful shop floor organization, defining characteristics of the future United Packinghouse Workers of America, the dominant union in the meat-packing industry through the 1950s.

In the early 1940s, Local 9 and the Hormel Company agreed on an innovative system of profit sharing. Under its terms, Hormel workers became the highest-paid packinghouse workers in the country. For more than three decades, relative industrial peace prevailed in Austin. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, new managerial policies started to erode Hormel workers’ job security. In 1985, faced with company demands for further concessions, Hormel workers went out on strike. The ensuing conflict, which lasted ten months, involved such tactics as a corporate campaign against Hormel and the First Bank of Minnesota, civil disobedience, and a national boycott of Hormel products. It also divided the labor movement, pitting rank-and-file activists against union officials in a number of international unions. A widespread support network allowed the local to continue its strike despite the intervention of the National Guard, the company’s recruitment of replacement workers, and the opposition of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. The strike ended in May 1986, when the United Food and Commercial Workers placed the Hormel local in trusteeship and signed a back-to-work agreement with the company.

Blum, Fred. Toward a Democratic Work Process: The Hormel Packing-House Workers Experiment. New York: Harper, 1953.

Englemann, Larry. “We Were the Poor People’: The Hormel Strike of 1933.” Labor History 12 (fall 1971).
Halpern, Rick. Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-1954. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Halstead, Fred. The 1985–1986 Hormel Meat-Packers Strike in Austin, Minnesota. New York: Pathfinder, 1986.

Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Rachleff, Peter. Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1999.

Schleuning, Neala J. Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86. Praeger, 1994.
1985-86 Strike Photographs: https://www.postbulletin.com/gallery/historic-photos-hormel-strike-in-austin/collection_ece99ca6-0017-11e6-8ffb-6b9da12844fc.html