May 14, 1998
This is the third in a series on rank-and-file labor struggles over the last 25 years
While the number of strikes and strikers plummeted during the 1980s and 1990s, most of the major labor struggles that did take place were in resistance to management demands for concessions. Three of the most important—and most revealing—occurred at the Austin, Minnesota plant of the Hormel meatpacking company, the Watsonville Canning company in southern California, and the Pittston Coal Company in Virginia. All three revealed a base of potential solidarity for embattled workers that was rarely appealed to in other conflicts of the period.
Austin P-9
At the start of the 1980s, the meatpacking industry was almost completely unionized with a master agreement providing a $10.69 wage rate. However, in the mid-1980s, the major packing companies initiated an extreme version of the offensive against labor taking place throughout American industry. Wilson filed for bankruptcy and cut wages from the negotiated $10.69 to $6.50. Can-Agra bought Armour, closed 13 plants, then reopened them with non-union workers earning only $6.00 per hour. Swift slashed wages as well.
In spring 1984, the United Food and Commercial Workers appeared ready to take a stand against further concessions at Hormel. UFCW National Packinghouse Division Director Lewie Anderson ordered that no locals consent to concessions. But shortly thereafter, UFCW agreed to reopen the contract at Hormel’s Ottumwa, Iowa plant. Ottumwa workers voted overwhelmingly to refuse to reopen the contract. Then Hormel laid off 444 workers and announced it was considering closing the plant unless concessions were granted. The local voted again against reopening the contract. Hormel laid off another 114 workers. In a third vote, workers accepted concessions cutting wages from $10.69 to $8.75. Then the laid off workers were recalled.
Hormel next demanded the same cuts from the rest of the UFCW locals. Local P-9 at Hormel’s Austin, Minnesota plant rejected concessions by a vote of 92 percent to 8 percent and other locals in the chain followed suit. The UFCW then called a meeting of Hormel local union officials, who agreed to the concessions their members had just voted to reject, bringing the wage rate at Hormel plants to $9.00.
Meanwhile, Oscar Mayer cut wages to $8.25. Hormel responded by cutting wages at Austin 23 percent, to the same level as Oscar Mayer, based on contract language pegging wages to industry norms. Wages fell so low that some full-time workers became eligible for food stamps.
Throughout this series of cuts, Local P-9 in Austin became increasingly disenchanted with the leadership of the UFCW. In December 1983, it elected Jim Guyette president on a platform of opposition to further concessions. Local P-9 began looking for alternative ways to resist Hormel’s offensive.
In September 1984, wives of P-9 workers began meeting in an Austin park and standing with signs at the plant gates once a week for all three shifts. By October, 400 women were coming to the meetings in the park. They called themselves the United Support Group, and soon began meeting in the Austin Labor Center. They organized a food shelf and a clothing exchange. Peter Rachleff, a labor historian who helped organize support for the strike, wrote, “The United Support Group transformed the Austin Labor Center—once the location of a local union that could not draw a quorum to its monthly meetings—into a beehive of activity. In so doing, they transformed Local P-9 from a trade union into a social movement.”
Local P-9 also began working with Ray Rogers and his consulting firm, Corporate Campaigns, Inc. Rogers proposed that P-9 mobilize its members and supporters to put pressure on First Bank Systems (FBS), Hormel’s banker and the largest outside shareholder of Hormel stock. The local established a communications committee and began reaching out to union, church, and community groups across the Midwest. Nightly meetings, dances, and other activities developed at the Labor Center.
But conflict with the UFCW also escalated: its president William Wynn warned Rogers it would be “regrettable” if P-9 launched a campaign without approval from the national union. But in January 1985, P-9 members voted to assess themselves $3.00 per week to hire Corporate Campaigns, Inc. Hundreds began picketing Hormel offices and plants and First Bank branches. Hormel and First Bank complained to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which held that the campaign was an illegal secondary boycott violating the Taft-Hartley Act. This put a serious crimp in Rogers’s strategy of focusing pressure on First Bank. In August 1985, Austin workers voted to strike by a 93 percent margin. They also initiated a boycott against Hormel. The UFCW officially sanctioned the strike.
The P-9 strike rapidly became a symbol of resistance to concessions and the focus for support efforts nationwide. Speakers and caravans from Austin traveled around the country. Union stewards at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts passed out a leaflet that articulates why the P-9 struggle struck such a responsive chord: “Working men and women in Minnesota have scratched a line in the cold hard ground and declared that they will give up no more of their pride, wages, or benefits…. Their victory will be hailed as the turning point against concessions bargaining, or their loss will be another crushed union. What stands between their victory or loss is the resolve of all of us.”
Support came not only from unions but also from farmers, peace and justice activists, poor people’s organizations, and environmental groups. Members of the peace group Women Against Military Madness conducted workshops in civil disobedience in Austin. Hundreds of workers and supporters subsequently participated in civil disobedience.
Governor Rudy Perpich sent 300 National Guard members into Austin to protect the strikebreakers who entered the plant across union picket lines. In early April, 6,000 labor activists from around the country came to Austin to attempt to shut the plant down with mass pickets and obstruction. An impromptu rally was met with tear gas, police attacks, and arrests on serious felony charges (all eventually dropped). Jesse Jackson flew into Austin and said, “What Selma, Alabama was to the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, Austin, Minnesota is to the struggle for economic rights in the 1980s.”
According to Rachleff, “Rallies, parades, dances, picnics, food caravans, Christmas parties, picketing, and plant gate demonstrations attracted the greatest outpouring of labor solidarity [in the United States] since the 1930s…. More than 3,000 local unions sent material assistance. Tens of thousands of rank-and-filers and local union officers visited Austin and offered help of one kind or another.”
But the strike, originally sanctioned by the UFCW, met increasing resistance from union officials. At the annual convention of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, the federation’s president ordered P-9’s information table shut down on the grounds that P-9 literature advocated a secondary boycott of First Bank and was thus illegal. Just before Thanksgiving in 1985, UFCW International President William Wynn wrote to AFL-CIO officers and affiliates condemning the “Adopt-A-Family” program P-9 had established. When a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Association of Machinists Lodge voted to send $10,000 to adopt several families, IAM President William Winpisinger intervened to block the payment. (In response, the local convened an “emergency” meeting, paid out a $35 per diem to those present, adjourned the meeting, and signed the $10,000-plus in checks over to P-9.) As official trade union support was increasingly blocked, 42 independent “P-9 Support Committees” were organized around the country.
In March 1986, Wynn ordered P-9 to return to work unconditionally. Eight hundred P-9 members met and voted overwhelmingly to ignore the order. Three weeks later, supporters poured into Austin and rallied at the plant gates in violation of an injunction. Seventeen were arrested on “felony riot” charges. Guyette and Rogers were charged with “aiding and abetting a riot” for having “mailed posters and leaflets” for the rally.
The UFCW put the local into trusteeship on the grounds that it had disobeyed the UFCW order to call off the strike. Backed by a court order, the UFCW sent in its regional director to take control of P-9’s office, bank account, and postbox. He ordered members to abandon all boycott activities and accept a new contract.
The UFCW-imposed contract allowed individuals to be fired for advocating a boycott of Hormel products or handbilling any business buying from or selling to Hormel. Under the contract dozens of workers were fired or refused recall rights for such crimes as having “Boycott Hormel” bumper stickers on their cars. One worker was eliminated from the rehire list for having a driver’s license ID photo taken with a “Boycott Hormel” sticker on his forehead. When P-9 members continued the boycott, the UFCW sent out a mailing to local unions across the country urging them to buy Hormel products “made by union brothers and sisters.”
Watsonville
In 1985, the Watsonville Canning company demanded a wide range of concessions, including a wage cut from $6.66 to $4.25 per hour. The 1,000 employees, members of Teamsters Local 91, who were mostly Latino women, struck. The strike was marked by strong roots in the Mexican-American community and culture. When opponents of the strike tried to provoke a riot, for example, the strikers responded with a traditional Mexican pilgrimage on their knees to the local Catholic church, where they prayed for justice. The workers stayed on the picket line for 18 months without a single defection.
Wells Fargo Bank provided Watsonville Canning $23 million in loans during the strike. The strikers’ committee organized an informational picket at the local Wells Fargo branch, but canceled it when Teamsters officials objected. When the central role of the bank became ever clearer, the strikers voted to publicly protest the bank’s support for Watsonville and to ask the Teamsters to withdraw $800 million in funds from the bank. As the strikers began making preparations for a campaign against Wells Fargo, the bank foreclosed on the $23 million in unpaid loans it had made to Watsonville Canning, forcing the company out of business.
Teamster officials negotiated a contract with the new operator of the company, but workers, dissatisfied that many would be denied medical benefits under the new contract, voted to postpone ratification. The Teamsters announced that the strike was over, cut off strike benefits, locked the strikers out of the union hall, and threatened to put the local in trusteeship. Six women then began a hunger strike in front of the cannery; hundreds of strikers and supporters surrounded the plant. That night negotiations resumed, and two days later workers voted overwhelmingly to accept a new contract with medical benefits for all workers.
Pittston
In November 1988, the Pittston Coal Group, Virginia’s largest coal operator and the second largest coal exporter in the country, demanded a long list of concessions, including cuts in health and pensions, work rule changes, and the right to open new non-union mines. The company demanded Sunday work and abandonment of the eight-hour day. When miners objected, Pittston Coal Group president Michael Odum said, “The world works seven days a week” and asserted that miners were only “using church as an excuse” to avoid Sunday work.
United Mine Workers of America President Richard Trumka called the company’s proposals “an economic death warrant” for Appalachian communities and decided to stake the future of the union on resisting them. The union combined a strike, mass non-violent civil disobedience, mobilization of solidarity nationally and internationally, a corporate campaign, and a workplace occupation into a winning strategy.
After working for more than a year without a contract, 1,700 UMWA workers struck Pittston on April 5, 1989. No union members crossed the lines. Pittston was not able to offer permanent replacement jobs to strikebreakers because the National Labor Relations Board found the company had engaged in unfair labor practices.
The UMWA brought in experienced peace activists to conduct non-violence training. Then strikers and their families, often dressed in the camouflage outfits that became the unofficial uniform of the strike, began blocking mines, roads, and coal trucks. More than 1,000 strikers and supporters were arrested the last week of April. A group of women organized “The Daughters of Mother Jones” and occupied the company’s regional headquarters overnight. Jesse Jackson told a rally of 12,000, “The tradition of John L. Lewis and the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. have come together in your actions.”
Even before the strike, Pittston had imported strikebreakers and Vance Security guards to protect them. Virginia’s governor called out several hundred state police to protect strikebreakers and arrest strikers. Injunctions forbade most strike activities. At one point, driving too slowly was interpreted as a violation of a federal injunction. Federal marshals accompanied the state police who arrested the drivers, some of whom were sentenced to as much as 90 days for this traffic misdemeanor. Fines against the union exceeded $60 million.
Officials of the mineworkers presented the strike as a struggle against the courts and federal labor laws. UMWA Vice-President Cecil Roberts told a rally, “This is class war. The working class versus the corporate rich and their allies in state and federal government.” When Judge Don McGlothin, Jr., issued fines of more than $30 million against the union, miners organized a write-in campaign and elected a strike leader to replace his father in the state legislature.
To protest fines, injunctions, and other government union-busting efforts, 46,000 miners in 11 states joined wildcat sympathetic strikes. The UMWA briefly sanctioned such strikes as contractually permitted “Memorial Days,” but thereafter discouraged them. Hundreds of miners and sympathizers also picketed and closed down several coal-fired factories and non-union mines.
In summer 1989, the New Jersey Industrial Union Council voted to ask the AFL-CIO to call a “one day union work stoppage” in support of Pittston and other strikers. But the AFL-CIO circulated an advisory letter to state federations and central labor councils discouraging sympathetic strikes: “[T]raditional responses such as food banks and coverage of the strike story in labor newspapers are certainly appropriate. This strike presents a specific issue where the strike has spread to other than Pittston mines. In some cases AFL-CIO affiliates are signatory to labor agreements at those facilities [to] which they remain legally bound.
“As an AFL-CIO state or local labor council you are advised to support the UMW in those areas of activity which do not conflict with the legal obligations imposed by the court on the UMW or by existing labor agreements with AFL-CIO affiliates.”
Rank and file support for the Pittston strikers went considerably beyond food banks and newspaper articles. An estimated 30,000 supporters came to Camp Solidarity between June and September 1989, including not only labor but religious and peace activists. “If you’d told me a year ago all this would happen, that I’d meet people from nearly every state in the union, from Denmark and Pakistan, from Italy and Germany, come here to help us, I’d have almost said you were a liar,” said a miner who had worked 32 years at Pittston. A roof bolter from an Exxon mine in Southern Illinois who came to Camp Solidarity explained, “I don’t want this at home. We’ve got to stop it here.” The president of a Pittston local said: “We’ve got people suffering badly here. So let’s go ahead and fight the fight here. There’s no use in letting some other groups somewhere else suffer. Let’s just have it all out right here while we’re at it. Maybe this will show these large companies that we’re going to stick together.”
One of the camp directors commented, “We’ve come to the point where we don’t even call it a strike anymore. It’s a people’s movement. We’re telling our people, ‘Hey, if this thing ends tomorrow, we’ve got people out there who need our help’.”
A corporate campaign put further pressure on Pittston. In Boston, a support committee targeted William Craig, a vice president of Shawmut Bank and picketed the bank. Trumka and 50 strikers spoke before the Boston City Council, which voted to withdraw city funds from Shawmut. Ultimately Craig was forced to resign as vice president of the bank.
International support also played a role. A delegation from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the largest global trade union confederation, visited the coalfields and protested the repression being imposed on the miners. At a time when the Reagan administration was trumpeting its support of Polish democratization with the slogan “Solidarity with Solidarity,” the delegation included a representative of the Polish Solidarity union who said he was “shocked to see what is happening in the great democracy.” The ICFTU delegation met with Pittston’s chief executive officer and helped persuade Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole to visit the strike. Dole then appointed a supermediator to encourage a settlement.
On September 17, 98 miners and a clergyperson (all owners of at least one share of Pittston stock) filtered around state police and arrived at Moss No. 3, Pittston’s key coal treatment plant. UMWA leader Eddie Burke recalled: “There were two Vance Security guards there. I told them, ‘We are an unarmed, nonviolent inspection team of stockholders coming to inspect our investment. You will not be harmed.’ The two Vance men left hurriedly. There were no weapons drawn.”
The miners called the occupation “Operation Flintstone” in memory of the 1936-1937 Flint sitdown strikes.
A court ordered the occupiers to vacate, but they refused to do so. The next day, a crowd of 2,000 lined the road in front of the plant to protect the occupiers. Soon 5,000 supporters surrounded the plant. The state police withdrew to a distance, while workers directed traffic. The occupiers remained for four days, waited until a few hours after the court’s September 20 evacuation deadline had passed, then marched triumphantly out of the plant.
The strike-plagued company lost $25 million on its coal operations in the fourth quarter of 1989. In October, Pittston returned to the bargaining table for the first time since July. Negotiators reached a settlement December 31, 1989, which included few of the concessions Pittston had demanded and required the company to meet the contract pattern established in the rest of the mining industry. U.S. News and World Report said miners “appeared to score a major victory” in “new job security provisions” limiting subcontracting to non-union firms. “Pittston’s attempts to shed some of the burden of financing health care benefits” proved “largely fruitless.”
These struggles illustrate the revamped tactics the labor movement developed in the 1980s, from community support to mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and from corporate campaigns to international labor solidarity. They show national union leaderships in roles varying from militant strike leadership to outright strikebreaking. They demonstrate the powerful institutional constraints that labor law and union contracts put on the action of workers and unions. They reveal often unexpected reserves of commitment and solidarity among workers directly subject to employer attack and among a wide swath of supporters.
Next installment: Organizing the Workforce