“Those men don’t know what they’re doing,” the chief engineer warned Hormel. A Strategy for Pressure. As the depression deepened in 1933, workers naturally became more concerned about their jobs and also more sensitive towards mistreatment by plant foremen. “For many workers at Hilton, two jobs is a norm,” says Jonathan Rezada, a bellman at the Hilton Grand Vacations timeshare. His success in settling the dispute peacefully contributed both to his continued popularity as well as to his reelection as governor in 1934. Sources of information on the local activities of this union are nearly nonexistent, but it appears that when the Amalgamated union called for a nationwide strike in 1921 for the maintenance of high war-time wages, the local in Austin was extended permission by officers of the International headquarters to continue working while the rest of the industry was picketed. But workers complained regularly of the prospect of going for weeks with small paychecks or none at all and Austin’s merchants worried over the necessity of arranging credit for seasonally unemployed Hormel workers. Unfortunately, despite the nearly unanimous acknowledgement that he would someday lead the family enterprise, Jay was given little training for looming responsibility. His plan was designed to elevate some of his workers to a pay status similar to that of foremen. Finally, he conceded that he was pleased with the unionization movement in the company and said he would give the new union a meeting hall right in the company’s offices. The strikers scattered in panic at first but then quickly and angrily reconverged on the guards and he supervisors. Anti-union forces seldom hesitated to use violence against Ellis and men like him. Major labor relations difficulties were not among George Hormel’s management problems. Disturbed by his son’s lack of serious academic effort at Princeton, George Hormel concluded that tuition was a poor investment in his son and Jay was brought him to Austin and the packinghouse. One man with union experience, however, eventually emerged from several secret discussion groups as a leader in the movement to organize. You had taken over someone’s property and I suppose in the heat of the moment such things happen. He became a member and organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an organization that recruited both skilled and unskilled laborers, and he was instrumental in establishing a “Wobbly” branch in Omaha, Nebraska. Charles Nyberg, senior vice president of Hormel, said the company wanted that, too. One year after Olson’s victory the plant in Austin had been shut down. At an early age he was sent away to a Shattuck School for Boys, a private military academy in nearby Faribault, Minnesota, rather than to the local public schools where he might have gotten to know the children and families of workers in the Hormel company. George assumed the newly created position of chairman of the board and retired to the more comfortable climate of Beverly Hills, California. As Ellis entered the sheriff’s office, however, he overheard a prominent local attorney, Otto Baudler, speaking to Governor Olson on the sheriff’s telephone in the next room. He quit that job because he felt he was not being paid enough and he came to Austin and was hired by the Hormel Company. Shoemaker left the bank and drove to the union headquarters where he met with the union’s executive committee. Three men working in the department were told by their supervisor to sign up for the deduction for the company insurance plan. After the meeting, word of the impending strike was leaked to several company officials as well as to a few of the influential businessmen in the town. As they spread out through the rest of the plant, the strikers found several foremen and supervisors. "In 1933 the meatpackers at the Hormel plant launched the plant's first labor strike" here or after it would be good to know the demands and if they were successful Added a new reference and added some demands, with the success of the strike discussed further down in the paragraph. Sign in to YouTube. A certificate of incorporation was drawn up and signed by the three men and one woman naming the organization the Independent Union of All Workers (IAUW). Following the approval of the agreement by both parties, Olson met reporters in the dining room of the Fox Hotel and discussed with them the details of the strike settlement. Lillian Gleason Hormel became the church organist. In May 1937, John L. Lewis began organizing packinghouse workers in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and in the ensuing organizational struggle the IUAW voted to affiliate with the national CIO and became Local 183 and later [1939] local 9 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America. On August 17, 1985, about 1,500 Hormel Foods Corporation workers went on strike at the meat-processing plant at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Minnesota. Olson discussed the proposed settlement with Ellis and Fosso and others for more than two hours. If you don't have permissions to post content yet, just request it here. The Hormel strike came at a time of continued defeats for the American working class. His passion for perfection inclined him towards the use of instructional meaty maxims for his employees whenever he observed them wasting time or materials. Ellis rose rapidly through the ranks of the IWW as he traveled throughout the country organizing local branches of the organization and listening to the grievances of working men and women. On Strike at Hormel: The Struggle for a Democratic Labor Movement, by Hardy S. Green. Jay’s most successful professional musical enterprise was his organization of an all-girl song and dance group called ‘The Hormel Chili-Beaners,” which barnstormed the Midwest performing and advertising Hormel Chile Con Carne in the mid-1930s] He began working in the plant where his father expected him to learn first-hand every operation of the meat-packing business from the bottom up. He suggested that Hormel would like to work out an accord with the union's national leaders. By the end of the summer, Ellis remembered, the IUAW had organized the entire town – store clerks, cooks, waiters, waitresses and even some farmers were in the new organization. No mention was made in Fosso’s letter of the growing discontent among union officials because of the company’s failure to give the union a signed copy of the September agreement or of the failure of the arbitration board to produce a new corrected and reworded final copy of the agreement. Ellis found the strongest sentiment for organization in the Hog Kill and he began meeting regularly with workers form that department in the tank house during the noon hour to discuss the formation of a union. To make matters even worse, wages in general in the meatpacking industry were in rapid retreat in 1930, 1931, 1932 and 1933. “They would have come by the load. Commissioner’s Office, Subject Files. Partly as a result of the anger engendered by the layoffs and partly because of his concern with losing men permanently during prolonged seasonal layoffs, Hormel sought a solution to the problems of rapid labor turnover and the associated necessity and expense of constantly training new workers. Fosso concluded that the increases in living costs and reductions in per capita earnings caused union members to believe that the time had come for a readjustment of widening gap between living costs and wages. Despite the good intentions he clearly had for his workers and his company, Hormel did not deem it necessary to put any effort into selling the new arrangement to his employees. But a scrap of meat on the floor was something else again.”. Two Views of the Strike in Austin The dispute between the United Food and Commercial Workers and its Local P-9 over the long strike at Geo. Ellis was found at his home and asked to come to the meeting and was driven to the park by one of the workers. He said he had been unable to believe stories that “good citizens would create any civil disturbances” in Austin and revealed that his greatest fear on Saturday had been that “somebody might organize a citizen’s army and march on the plant, resulting in the cutting of each other’s throats. That autumn the IUAW leadership decided it was time to press their demands further with the Hormel Company. “I am proud of the picket lines,” he said, “but I can’t agree with the offer submitted here. In the early 1980s, recession impacted several meatpacking companies, increasing competition which led smaller and less-efficient companies to go out of business. On 19 August 1985 Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) went on strike against Geo. Most workers in the prospering Hormel Company in the 1960s and the 1970s who remembered or read about the history of their union concluded that the hard times were behind them. It also involves, this argument holds, violations of sacred labor tenants: solidarity, keeping things ''inside the family,'' not ''bucking the leadership. A principal reason for this was Hormel’s friendship and openness with many of his workers who in turn did not hesitate to discuss their grievances and problems personally with him. Sign in. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Always unsure of Olson’s real sympathies, Hormel warned the governor not to come to Austin personally. He needed their help and the men needed to work together, he told them. ▶ Get 'recent posts' refreshed more regularly The working out of the Master Plan involved wage increases and some significant new fringe benefits for the workers. The company agreed to the principle of seniority and to a provision that allowed for the submission of crucial grievances to arbitration. The strike ''is a real threat,'' he said, to the ''whole style of unionism'' that has existed for decades in this country. They heard of no action by company officials during the morning to give serious consideration to their demands. With a strike that wore on, the company reopened the plant Jan. 13 with workers who had abandoned the strike and with newly hired people. The Hormel strike symbolized the fight back against this new corporate agenda, not just because of the injustice of the corporate demands but also because of the heroism of the strikers. That when females replace males in the plant, the rate of compensation be the same as that paid to the male workers. During that period Hormel’s good business sense enabled him to weather the depression of the 1890s, survive the competitive onslaught by the Big Six meat packers intended to drive the small independents in the Midwest out of existence, and reorganize financially following massive embezzlement by one of his own trusted officers. His campaigns, he said, involve not only attacks on companies and banks, suppliers and customers, but also extensive preparation of the rank and file before strikes, targeted picketing if strikes occur, and the building of coalitions. He knew what it was like to be poor, to be a working man, to wade ankle deep in warm hog’s blood twelve or fourteen or sixteen hours a day and to stand endless hours in the refrigerated storage rooms of the plant only to face the withering humid heat of the Midwestern summer at the end of each working day. Governor Olson, on the other hand, found himself the target of a torrent of newspaper criticism following the strike settlement. At 1:00AM on September 24, union officers were summoned from their beds to meet in an emergency session with 150 businessmen and company officials to discuss ways of averting the strike scheduled for later that morning. Unlike his father, Jay simply ignored reports of intolerable practices by middle and lower-echelon plant managers, apparently assuming that those in command in each department could best assess what measures were required to exact efficient and competent labor efforts from other employees. Jay feared, he said, the destruction of the critical and expensive refrigeration system and should it be destroyed there was a strong likelihood he would opt not to open the plant again. Hearing this, a more relaxed Hormel explained to Olson his theory that the strike had nothing to do with the policies of the company but was instead caused by “outside agitators” who had been hired carelessly by the company – here he referred primarily to the policies of Ellis of inviting his radical friends to Austin to work in the plant. If you'd like to upload content to the library which is in line with the aims of the site or will otherwise be of interest to libcom users, please check out our guides to submitting library/history articles and tagging articles. At a special meeting on Friday, September 22, union members discussed striking in order to gain a solid collective bargaining agreement with the company that would include seniority rights. But dissatisfaction with the semi-voluntary system increased as more and more Hormel works, many with only the semblance of a job in the plant, joined the ranks of the working-needy because of drastically reduced hours and paychecks. Two incidents marked changes from the early days in the plant. In order to protect jobs, he explained, production costs had to be kept in line with industry-wide figures. As Syck and his men struggled to push the doors open, several workers picked up the vehicle, passengers and all and turned it around so it faced the direction from which it had just come. As the strikers approached the plant entrance and as the company guards nervously braced themselves to confront the impending assault, all remaining sense of order that had characterized the picketing during the morning disintegrated in a moment. “I can’t say what the Commission will do,” he said. If Hormel wanted to be a benevolent dictator within his own plant, they agreed, that was his right. Most were unsure as to what action should be taken. Foremen were permitted to finish processing sheep in the following confusion, but all other work in the plant was suspended. Thomason went to prison for his crime and Hormel went to a special meeting of the company creditors in Chicago to bargain for a special credit extension. In a plan designed to ease the shock on both labor and management from seasonal ups and downs in employment, Hormel decided, without conferring with any representatives of his workers, to place a portion of his company’s emp0loyees n a “straight time” basis. Prospects for the Strikers. More tear gas was fired, on canister cracking the skull of a striker. The general approach of the IUAW in Austin remained relatively radical for most of the 1930s, as evidenced by the repeated resort to sit-down strikes in the face of increasing public hostility toward the tactic and as evidenced in the lead editorial of the union newspaper, The Unionist, which first appeared in October 1935 and proclaimed, “In line with the history and tradition of the Union, this paper will be radical and militant, dynamic rather than static, alive rather than asleep…. Hormel told his employees he wanted to see Herbert Hoover reelected president but far more important for the company in Austin was the election of Republican Earle Brown as governor of Minnesota. Yet that support is significant. Previously, all Hormel workers were paid by the hour and were laid off when business was slack. The official history of the Austin union (Frank W. Schultz, “Historical Sketches of the Packinghouse Union in Austin, Minnesota, 1933-1939,” unpublished MS in the possession of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Local 9, Austin, Minnesota) states that the union was born in the hog kill as a result of those meetings. MNHS call number: Reading Room HD 5325 .P152 1985 .A873 1990. He was able to use his own experiences in convincing workingmen of his sincerity and concern for their welfare. Olson met a second time with the union officers. Hormel had threatened to close down his operations and leave Austin in the face of this new union challenge and local businessmen feared that the strike might ruin them. In the confused and excited moments that followed, union officials concluded that the premature action of a few workers left them no alternative other than to refute the actions of those workers and thereby question and weaken the solidarity of the union at this crucial moment, or to endorse the action of the workers in the plant and join them in striking. But then, displaying a courageous presence of mind in a heated and chaotic situation, Hormel stood his ground and faced the strikers and in careful, measured tones told them that he wanted no trouble in his company. The company could profit from the new arrangement, Hormel assumed, by keeping a larger portion of its workers permanently on the job. Despite the pretensions of neutrality, Ellis and other union officials were convinced that Syck, Marcusen and other prominent city officials were far more sympathetic to Hormel than they were to the workers. For several months Ellis had been hiring former union members from the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the IWW from throughout the Midwest. Ellis gained more and more attention from the men as they sensed the tone of authority in his voice and they listened with interest as he related for them his own experiences in union organization. Following the seizure of the plant, union president Fosso remained in his office at the union hall issuing commands and conferring with his lieutenants, Charles Oots and Frank Ellis. Hormel’s often expressed contempt for the radical Farmer-Labor governor was neither surprising nor secret. I would have given you the raise before if I could afford it…. The First World War provided a temporary respite for Jay away from Austin and the family business. Late Saturday evening, while the bonfires of the pickets burned brightly around the entrances to the Hormel plant and while company officials anxiously awaited the results of their appeals for federal and state troops, union members gathered at the union hall for a Saturday night dance and discussion and took turns transporting coffee and sandwiches to the men and women on the picket lines. Worried, Syck sent an emergency telegraph to the Governor: SITUTATION HER SO UNRULY THAT DEPUTIZING OF UN-UNIFORMED AND POORLY-AREMED CITIZENS WOULD PRECIPITATE GUERILLA WARFARE WITH PITIFUL CASUALTIES ON BOTH SIDES, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE MEN HAVE BEEN TOLD LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES WOULD NOT INTERFERE WITH THEM. Scores of children were employed in many departments of the plant at 25 cents an hour – some of them the sole support of an entire family. The consultant, who has worked full time on the campaign for more than a year, said that so far his concern, Corporate Campaign Inc., had received $111,000. Twenty-five years ago today, workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minn. went on strike, bringing the struggles of the national labor movement home to southern Minnesota. We should never have employed about 200 of these people and more than likely we would then never have had this difficulty.” Hormel conceded that the difficulties that had arisen in Austin seldom occurred in metropolitan centers where closer statistical checks were kept on employees. There he met and courted Germaine Dubois of La Vernelle, an auburn-haired daughter of a miller. The central role played in the strike by the Austin United Support Group brought the issues of economic justice and community survival to the forefront of the labor movement agenda. If the strike had continued Hormel wouldn’t have had to import men,” Shoemaker cautioned. After speaking with Hormel, Olson dispatched Starkey to Austin and then secretly mobilized three hundred national guardsmen and stationed them in Owatonna, thirty miles from Austin, in preparation for their rapid deployment in Austin should there be a further breakdown of order in the community. These two events, depression and unionization, were closely linked, but most likely had economic difficulties not hurt the company after 1929, it is quite certain that some serious internal readjustments would have shaken the Hormel Company before the end of 1933. When the company demanded a 23 percent wage cut, on August 17, 1985, about 1,500 workers with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local P-9, in Austin walked off the job. Their weekly wage was set and did not depend on the actual number of hours worked. Noté /5. Despite his efforts to maintain personal supervision and control over all aspects of his business, as the company expanded it became increasingly apparent that George Hormel was losing the intimate contacts he valued with his employees. The foreman said, pointing at various people, ‘You have a new cap tomorrow…and you have your mustache cut off.’ The foreman pointed at an old fellow who had a torch in his hand and was sweating all over. 4. Yet Ellis remained an unreconstructed and unapologetic radical. In the '80s, Hormel felt pressure to remain competitive in the meatpacking industry. In the ensuing disorderly melee, several plant supervisors threw tear gas canisters into the ranks of the strikers. At midnight on Friday, as five hundred workers milled around the main entrance to the plant, a table was carried to the front gate to be used by Jay Hormel as a speaking platform. The town’s streets were patrolled at that time by special deputies while the entire uniformed police force had been stationed among the strikers surrounding the plant. These men were replaced with younger and more competent executives while a significant portion of the company’s control was delegated to Jay C. Hormel. One hour after the plant had been stormed by the workers, quiet and peace descended on the plant. As a result, the initial adoption of the plan in the smokehouse aroused both the distrust and the jealousy of other workers for those selected for this first stage of the reorganization. During the discussion, Congressman F. H. Shoemaker, a radical Farmer-Laborite, drove into town. Olson said he had been especially impressed by the willingness of both sides to submit their problems to arbitration by the State Industrial Commission. Jay Catherwood Hormel, the only child of George and Lillian Hormel, was born in 1892. In the months following the stock market crash in October 1929, and with the decline in consumer demand, manufacturers throughout the country started to cut back production and lay off workers, initiating what appeared to many as a grim spiral of declining prices, declining wages and rising unemployment. They are not going to create a condition worse than that which led you to strike.”, After Olson had finished speaking, Ellis addressed the gathering. Hormel not only came into close contact with his employees in the plant but also with their families and relatives in the community outside the facility. For a labor organization so new and relatively unstable, the decision proved to be a godsend. Olson promised that Starkey would undertake a fair investigation and conceded that if it proved necessary, he would come to Austin himself to help settle the dispute, a move that Hormel very much wanted to prevent. At first the demand for the new product was surprisingly responsive, but after only a few months the market dried up. After a brief initial discussion, a group of men left the meeting to locate Frank Ellis and bring him to the park. Following the settlement of the strike, he told his workers, “I couldn’t lick you, so I joined you. The editorial staffs of these paper attacked Olson, hitting hard on his failure to break the strike with troops. It was imposed with a minimum among of explanation to the men and women working in the plant. He had assumed over the years that what was good for his company was good also for the community and he had successfully convinced the Austin business community of the truth of that assumption. In other words, I can’t be put on the spot. He felt that command of the situation was firmly in the hands of the union workers and that Hormel would buckle under within a matter of hours. Also not unnoticed by many of those at the meeting were the foremen and supervisors hiding behind nearby trees and writing down the names of the leaders and the speakers present at the meeting. Achetez neuf ou d'occasion The Farm Holiday Association sided with the IUAW strikers who had recently backed their efforts to withhold perishable agricultural commodities from the market in order to raise prices. Permit supervisors to take care of the sheep. Hormel telephoned the plant and spoke with the engineers who were supervising and tending the refrigeration system. The officers have suggested we deputize some of our members. The recession of the early 1980's … The strike by Local P-9 against the Hormel Co. in 1985-86 marked a turning point in American labor history. And in a way, Hormel had been correct in his prediction. For nine months, several hundred meatpackers have been fighting their employer, Geo. Considering that his original position of granting only pay increases that would leave the company in a fair competitive position with the rest of the industry, Jay Hormel lost little in the Olson settlement. The specific incident that transformed the informal discussion groups into a union organization was Hormel’s proposal of a new insurance program. For many years he was truly the “benevolent dictator” of the company, but he never used those words to describe his position. The local union, P-9 of the Food and Commercial Workers, overwhelmingly rejects a contract offer with a $2/hour wage cut. We were the poor people. But there seems to be more behind their stance. An arbitration board was to be selected by the union from “representative businessmen” of the town, and the board was then to be delegated the task of rewording the agreement between the company and the union and issuing a final draft to both sides. “ Soon thereafter he initiated his “Master Plan,” a system of anticipatory welfare capitalism. And so when things were going relatively well for the town and the company, the benevolent dictator of the company best not be provoked or challenged. He was given two hours to kill the fires in the plant boilers. Little did Jay suspect upon inheriting the presidency of the company in 1929 that within four years his little benevolent dictatorship would come crashing down in a sudden and frightening manner. The lesson learned from the experience, it seems, was that under Hormel’s management, workers could receive the benefits of unionization without any of its obligations. By 1985, Hormel felt pressure to remain competitive. A very concerned Hormel asked the governor about rumors he’d heard in Austin that regardless of what the strikers did inside the plant there would be no punitive action taken against them by the state. At the same time he asked Olson to place all of the children of officers of the company under special state guard and that they all be transported out of Austin on the following morning. Ellis was also aware, however of the pressure that might be brought to bear upon Hormel if he believed that the refrigeration system had been shut down. Jay Hormel signed the agreement as president of the company. Hormel told him that the plant had been taken away from him by the union and that the city was in serious danger of a violent upheaval. His tactics and the publicity he has attracted make many labor leaders wary. Organize the entire town, he shouted. “I didn’t want to see federal troops in here,” he said. The IUAW waited only two weeks before pressing for more extensive agreements with the company. The Associations efforts helped lift some important duties from the IUAW rank and file and added important moral support to the efforts of the union. In July 1937, several department in the plant used sit-down strikes to demand a closed-shop agreement with the company. Effects on Master Plan. I am a friend of labor,” he reminded his audience. He asked them to send someone into the plant in order to turn on the refrigeration system and keep in running. In fact, while Hormel was experimenting with his own straight-time program, numerous other businesses abandoned similar schemes because of its unexpected and unbearable expense. This new scheme was to cost each worker only $.20 a week, yet that small amount became the stumbling block leading to the sudden dramatic decline of Hormel’s power within the company. He learned from them that the strikers were prepared to allow the shipment of 550 unweaned calves from the plant to some other facility. Hearing this exchange, Shoemaker excused himself and left the union hall and returned to the bank where he immediately told Hormel that he had prevailed upon the strikers to turn the refrigeration system on and to save the products stored inside the plant. Give labor the fair treatment that is its right and labors’ right to organize will never harm you.” One shocked Owatonna businessman with labor problems as well as an unhealthy appendix, after hearing Hormel’s words, requested that the local newspaper censor “the more inflammatory passages” from its report of the speech. Packing It In! Unable to open his blockaded plant, Jay Hormel admitted defeat. Cracking the skull of a new insurance program agreements with the engineers who were supervising tending. 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