Planet Money - SPAM strikes back

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Hormel Foods makes SPAM, and for generations, the company also created jobs for families in Austin, Minnesota. Today, the story of a labor strike that threatened to tear one small town apart. (This episode was made in collaboration with The Experiment podcast.) | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. There has been a tsunami of job resignations in the U.S. workforce recently. This is being called the Great Resignation. A wave of worker strikes sweeping across America. Thousands across... In the past few years, there have been some pretty high-profile labor strikes. 2018 saw the year of teacher strikes. 2019, General Motors went on strike for five weeks. And this year, there was John Deere, Kellogg's, Starbucks. The list goes on.

In a lot of cases, workers are striking against a CEO they've never met, someone who likely makes close to 350 times their salary, and who might live thousands of miles away. But what if this all takes place in a small town where the CEO lives just down the street from the factory worker, where they constantly run into each other at the grocery store or at their kids' baseball games? And then, in this small town, one of the most acrimonious strikes in history breaks out. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronchik. And I'm Julia Longoria.

Julia is the host of a great podcast called The Experiment. It's from The Atlantic and WNYC Studios. And she and producer Gabrielle Burbay bring us the story of a deeply personal strike and the aftershock people still feel decades later. Today on the show, we go to the tight knit town of Austin, Minnesota, the place where spam is made. You know, the mystery meat in the blue and yellow can. And we revisit the time when about 1500 meatpackers captured the world's attention and tried to turn back an inevitable tide. For this episode, we are handing the mic over to Julia and Gabrielle of The Experiment

to tell us about the 1980s strike at the Hormel meatpacking plant. Before coming to Austin, we'd read in history books about the famous 1980s Hormel Strike. But we wanted to understand how it felt for the people here. So our first stop was the home of Race Hardy, the son of a meatpacker. Race was a great tour guide because he spent most of his life in Austin, Minnesota. He teaches economics at Riverland Community College there. I'm trying to convince Riverland to just have me just a class, my economics class,

just on Hormel foods. He's kind of an unofficial historian of the Hormel Corporation. Well, I think you could get a degree in spam. Yes, a spam degree. Part of the reason Race knows so much about Hormel is because his family worked at the company for generations. You can see the graveyard there and the cemetery.

We drive by the cemetery where three generations of Race's family are buried, all of whom worked at the Hormel Corporation. Hormel was founded in Austin, Minnesota in 1891. Hormel Foods is to Austin what General Motors was to Detroit. The founder, George Hormel, wanted to create a family company, one that would provide for generations of Austonians. Race's grandfather started working there in 1930. Inside the factory, the work of making Spam was intense.

It's a sensual overload. So orchestrated and choreographed. It's an assembly line or disassembly line. And each worker had a piece of the puzzle. When he whacked the pig in the head, it was stunned. Whacked it with a sledgehammer. And now someone's got to get the skin off. Rigor mortis sets in.

A job called snatching guts. You reach into the pig carcass. Pull up the stomach because the stomach still operates. And you got to get it out of there or it's going to burst and destroy the carcass. And the reason the men did this tough, gruesome, and exhausting work was because it gave their families a way of life. My mom and my siblings and I were going to be taken care of financially and health-wise. Meatpackers at the plant were all part of the local union that had

been in place since 1933. And that meant meatpackers did well. In the early 80s, the minimum wage was $3.35. Starting salary at Hormel was three times that much. Race's dad, who worked in the plant for decades and logged overtime, made even more than that. My dad had an $886 weekly check in 1974. That's thousands of dollars now. The equivalent of a six-figure job today. So that's why he did that job. He could take our whole family and just head out on a two-week vacation, you know, and then have a week hanging out in Hawaii and you're a factory worker.

That was the dream. You can get a house, go on vacation, and your kids can do activities. It wasn't just the meatpackers at Hormel that lived this dream. Union power was strong in post-war America. Into the 50s and 60s, the middle class grew. The wealth gap between worker and management was a lot smaller than it is today. Back then, a single earner family could own a home, take the family on vacations. It was the American dream. Good evening. I'm speaking to you tonight to give you a report on the state of our nation's

economy. I regret to say that we're in the worst economic mess. But then, moving into the 1980s, we began to see a shift. The dollar weakened. American jobs moved abroad. We saw globalization, automation. We're threatened with an economic calamity of tremendous proportions. The government announced today that there are now more Americans out of work than at any time since the Great Depression. To adapt, American corporations started cutting jobs and cutting pay.

American Airlines yesterday asked all its employees to accept a 5% pay cut for three months. Workers at the company are protesting what they say are poor working conditions, inadequate health benefits, and low wages. Chrysler. Workers agreed to give up more than a billion dollars in wage and benefits.

Ford has asked workers at one plant to cut their pay in half. General Motors has reported to have begun a campaign to steal workers. Unions pushed back against these changes using the best tool that they had, the labor strike. The right of men to leave their jobs is a test of freedom.

Strikes had been breaking out across the country for years with mixed results. But one strike in particular... Air traffic controllers walked off their jobs this morning. ...sent a clear message to workers and signaled a shift in the American workplace. This morning at 7 a.m., the union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike. In the summer of 1981, over 12,000 air traffic controllers violated federal law by going on strike. They'd been out for just two days when the president of the United States himself stepped in and did what no president had done before.

And if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated. and will be terminated. 48 hours after making his speech, President Reagan fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers on strike. President Reagan, at the time in the 80s, changed the rules of the game. This was the environment that in 1984, Hormel, the family company, started making some changes.

They cut people's wages way down. Just cut people's wages way down. Just cut everybody's wages and benefits. They announced to keep pace with the rest of the meatpacking industry, they would also need to cut wages and benefits. This is pay that had been stable or growing since Hormel started. They cut it by over 20%, from $10.69 an hour to $8.25. If you think you've earned something, especially through your body, you know, that's a really tough thing. It was something being taken that people thought they earned. And on top of that, workers and historians we interviewed told us the company

was changing the way that Packers worked in the plant. Chain speeds were increased, significantly increased. So people were working harder and faster and getting hurt more. Workers who had once had a lot of control over the pacing of their work were now being forced to work at a breakneck speed. Workers reported they were getting injured more often. You had women who worked in the plant who couldn't pick up their children anymore. They had to pick them up with their elbows because their wrists were shot. The union that represented these workers got together and made a plan.

They would resist. Of course, they knew about the strikes across the country and that the strikes were failing. They knew that the deck was stacked against workers. But Austin wasn't like the rest of the country. Austin was a family town. Here's producer Gabrielle Burbay. In Austin, worker and management took each other's kids to school. They sat in the same pews at church.

In other disputes, like if you were Ronald Reagan or the CEO of Chrysler or American Airlines. You didn't have to worry about going to church and having somebody spit on the back of your head. You know, other strikes were out in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. They were in metropolitan urban areas. But none of those other strikes were in a place like this. All of it just came to a head, and it didn't come to a head in an urban area or a metropolitan area. It came to a head in the middle of a bunch of cornfields in the last county on I-35 in Minnesota.

It came in Austin. If the workers at the Hormel plant wanted any chance of protecting their wages, their families, and their way of life, they were going to need a truly capable leader. Someone who could navigate a very tricky political situation. They found that leader in a man named Jim Guyette. Tell me where you grew up. Austin, Minnesota. Middle of a cornfield. My father worked at the plant and my grandfather worked at the plant. Jim comes from a long line of Hormel meatpackers. He'd been working there since college. And in 1984, he was elected president of the local meatpackers union. And I think, you know, a lot of times things are deliberately complicated when they don't have to be.

It's not that hard. So I feel, you know, my job is to kind of break it down into simpler pieces that people can understand. For him, the situation was black and white. Corporations were taking too much, and workers needed to fight back. Jim's vice president at the union was Lynn Houston. Jim was such a good thinker and talker. Very honest, straight shooter. The local union tried to negotiate with the company to at least keep their wages and benefits as is. Not asking for a raise, just keep the status quo. We took it to arbitration. We tried to negotiate with them on it.

The company offered them a deal. It was better than the original proposal, but they still insisted we have to lower wages and cut benefits. And the way the national economy was headed, many people, including the big dogs at the international union, thought that Jim and Lynn should take the deal. But the local union voted and said, no way. And finally, it was the regional director at that time

that said, you know, guys, you got no choice. All you can do is go on strike. We just went down to the plant and said we were going on strike. That's what we did. Workers at the Hormel plant hadn't been on strike since the Great Depression. And now, in the summer of 1985, hundreds of workers went down to the meatpacking plant, gathered at the entrance, and displayed the posters they made with a message to management. One slogan was a touch graphic. Skip ahead if you don't want to hear it.

was a Dutch graphic. Skip ahead if you don't want to hear it. Cram your spam. Wait, what does that mean? Well, cram your spam, like shove it up your anus, you know? Oh! There were signs all over town when they were on strike. 1,500 workers didn't go to work that day,

and Hormel had to temporarily shut down the plant. But Jim made sure this wasn't your average strike, that the country had seen so many of by this point. If you want to win, you need to do more than just stand on a picket line. You need to involve the family. From the very beginning, Jim understood who the real players of the strike were going to be. The pressure on the spouse and the children is real. It was something that affected everybody. So Jim invited them all down to the Austin Labor Center to be a part of the strike,

which transformed the place into a sort of hub of activity. They made toys for kids. We had a clothing exchange. They handed out food to families. We had dances at the Union Hall and higher bands, and everybody brought their kids and had a good time. Did the Union feel like a family? Without a doubt. Lynn said a song that was playing often was Queen, We Are the Champions. This was the 80s. Come out with boombox and start playing that song. And just get everybody fired up, you know. You kind of make it sound like it was fun. It was. And by January of 1986, the strikers had fanned out around the country,

calling workers across industries to their cause. Rochester and Albert Lee and Owatonna and Faribault. First in the Midwest to other Hormel plants, urging workers there to strike. Fremont, Nebraska and Ottumwa, Iowa. Waterloo, Iowa. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Madison, Wisconsin. And then they spread the word of the strike to the far stretches, like to the coasts. You know, it's weird because Austin's just this little town in the middle of nowhere.

And then all of a sudden the New York Times is here, you know, and ABC, NBC, CBS, and not the local affiliates around the area, but the national ones. Reverend Jesse Jackson stepped off the plane in Austin this morning, bringing a ray of hope to the bitter eight-month meatpackers' strife. Jesse Jackson was here a number of times. In many ways, what Selma, Alabama was to the voting rights movement in 65, Austin, Minnesota has become that to collect the bargain in 1986. And once we got on the national news every night, it went all over the world. One

historian we talked to told us a South African union organizer came down to Austin and later said he'd managed to smuggle a Cram Your Spam t-shirt into Nelson Mandela's jail cell. You know, I went to England, got a resolution to boycott Harmel products. I think we got donations from something like 70 countries. What do you think resonated with people in 70 countries? I think it was just because we were just working people like them, and we were willing to stand up and say, this is enough.

With Jim and Lynn's strategy, the strike had become an international phenomenon, with money starting to pour in from all over the world. And because of those donations, the strike was able to keep going. At a time when the workers seemed to be failing around the country, this strike was a ray of hope. What Jim Guyot did, he worked his rear end off.

He was relentless. He was honest. That's Race Hardy again, the son of a meatpacker. He was honest. People thought he was, no, he was honest. He was relentless. He was honest. That's Race Hardy again, the son of a meatpacker. He was honest. People thought he was, no, he was honest. He was transparent. He was consistent. But he was ignorant of global phenomenons. There was nothing jolly about this. This was a strike.

And with every strike, there's only two things that are going to happen. You're going to win or you're going to lose. That's after the break. You're listening to Planet Money. I'm Julia Longoria, host of The Experiment, bringing you the story of the 1980s strike at the Hormel Meatpacking Plant. At this point, we are 10 months into the strike. 1986 has been another year of pain and discontent for the organized labor movement. The strikers in Austin were unique.

For one, the town was small, small enough that the effects of the strike were personal, both for workers and for management. And the union organizers had gotten creative in that they made the strike a family affair. Spouses and children were all brought in to be a part of the strike. We heard this over and over from the people we talked to. Family was the how of the strike and also the why. Hi, are you Dee Dee? Hi.

We went to visit Dee Dee Bergstrom and her husband, former striker R.J. Bergstrom, at their home in Austin. Before they started a family, R.J. and Dee Dee began dating as teenagers. I just thought he was handsome, which he was very. Big muscles. Come back tan from the Vietnam. What about you? I had big boobs. That's why you like me.

Gee whiz. And when they got married, RJ was the sole breadwinner. Well, I always wanted to be a cartoonist, but then I got married, got pregnant, and had a child. So I just stayed a home mom. That's what I was. Well, then the strike came, and that was a tough thing for the family. RJ knew it was tough for his family. At the peak of the strike, there were bites on the picket line, police used tear gas, the National Guard even got called in to control the chaos. But he had this conviction that if the strikers just held out, his family would be better off.

I had a picture of my family on my chest, and I walked, National Guard were standing, you know, almost at attention, just looking straight ahead in line, and I said, this is what we're fighting for, you know, our families. And you were there for your family. When we asked DeeDee about what the strike was like for her. I was worried. I was scared. She paints a very different picture than the one strike leaders Jim and Lynn talk about.

It was a real rocky, rocky time. Because you wanted to keep it as normal as you can. I hated going in the line and getting the free food. And sometimes it was, you know, outdated or whatever. We didn't like going to, like, Salvation Army and getting that block of cheese and then the box of powdered milk. But then after you're out a while and you're only getting 40 a week for strike pay that don't go very far you know you got behind on

house payments and the sheriff would come out and give you a notice or whatever and so the banks weren't really too fond of the strikers, you know. Did you guys have discussions about him crossing the picket line? Like, did you want him to? I knew he wouldn't. Inside, yes, I did, but I couldn't express it because I knew he wouldn't go back. You mean cross the picket line? Right.

Did you ever think about crossing? No. No, I never was going to cross. But as months wore on, the pressure to cross was growing for families. Management wasn't budging, and some of the families started to wonder if it was all worth it. Could they last? There was nothing rosy in my dad's eyes about it at all. There was nothing rosy. Race came home from college to watch as the strike wore into the winter. It was ugly. It was painful. I mean, people were hurt. I mean, people were just, first of all, they were angry, but then it started being they got desperate. The tight-knit town of Austin, where the lines between worker and management were blurred,

and their families lived side by side. That dynamic changed. Around Christmastime, Race ran into Mrs. Knowlton, the wife of Hormel's CEO, who used to drive him to school as a kid. I said, oh, it's Mrs. Knowlton. Race approached Mrs. Knowlton to say hello. And she turned, and those two guys just pounced on me for attacking Mrs. Knowlton. And she said, oh, Race, Race, no, no, no, no, no, and gave me a hug. I said, I didn't attack her.

Didn't you see her hug me? And it's just like, holy buckets. Mrs. Knowlton had to have two bodyguards to go grocery shopping. I mean, come on. You got to be kidding me. But she had to. Constant death threats. We tried to reach out to Mrs. Knowlton and the families of corporate leaders to hear their memory of the strike, But we didn't receive any replies. Many of them have since moved away from Austin. As the winter of 1986 wore on,

tensions just grew higher and higher. But Race's dad kept going out on the picket line. He wasn't going to cross that picket line. He cared about workers. He had hope. Maybe it will work out because Dick Knowlton, all of the executives, but two at that time, grew up in Austin, all started in the factory and worked their way all the way up through. And they're finally going to say, you know what,

let's compromise here and we'll give two. We won't just take. That was the hope. But then the writing on the walls started getting, it was blurry at first, but it became very distinct that this is not going to end well. By this point, Race's dad had spent one year working odd jobs, trying to support his four kids. One of them was sick. My little sister has epilepsy. It all got to be too much. And then one night that summer of 1986,

Race's dad got a call from a friend in corporate. He called my dad late at night, the last possible day to get a job, and said to my dad, I have a job for you. But if you don't go tomorrow morning, you're done. And when that happened, he told my mom, I'm going in. And he went in. There was a number of people I told to cross that picket line. Lynn, the vice president of the union, eventually encouraged people to cross. A couple of them, their wives were diagnosed with cancer and they had no medical.

They came into my office and says, geez, I don't know what to do. I says, I'll tell you exactly what to do. You get up early tomorrow morning and you go ahead and go into work. That's the best thing you can do for your family. We asked Union President Jim Guyette about this. Was there a part of you that could empathize with the people that were saying, like, I'm behind on my home payments? No. No. No. No.

No. Not at all. You either stand for something or you don't. You know, everything else is an excuse. The beginning of the end came when the big dogs at the International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, came in and took over the local union. Jim and Lynn were pushed out. The International Union program was, you've got to take these concessions.

This is the way of the world. You got to do it. It's just nothing else we can do. The new union leaders made a deal with the company. They accepted the lower wages and benefits that the company offered. And we would have gotten what we wanted had it not been for the International Union. The International Union ended the strike on September 13th, 1986. And of the 1,500 workers on strike, around 500 of them went back to work in the end. No matter which side you were on, the strike stayed with people. There are people who still don't talk to each other. Jim Guyette, the leader of the union, ended up leaving Austin, Minnesota entirely.

He couldn't stand being there after the strike ended. He lives in upstate New York now. You know, we all said we were all going to go back or none of us were going to go back. You had people who, they went back to work. I guess they were more comfortable being in bed with the company You had people who, they went back to work. I guess they were more comfortable being in bed with the company than they were with their union brothers and sisters. For Jim Guyette, the union bonds were thick as blood. Do you think, in your philosophy,

should work aspire to feel like a family? Like, should that be the goal, that they treat you like a family would? Sure it should. It should absolutely be the goal. Work isn't family. Work is for family. And that's why there was such a disconnect. I mean, who chooses to snatch guts to pass time?

You've got to be kidding me. I mean, seriously, whose hobby? Have you ever heard of a hobby? Well, what do you do for a hobby? I snatch guts. I mean, that, yeah, that's absurd. To me, that's an absurd statement. Work is not about family. Work is for, if you're going to work in a packing house, you're working for your family. You're working for your family. After the strike failed, many of the white middle-class strikers whose families had worked at Hormel for generations left Austin, Minnesota altogether.

But the meatpacking plant stayed open, and it still makes spam today. This episode was originally produced by The Experiment, which is a co-production from the Atlantic and WNYC studios. The Experiment has gone all in on spam. They've done an excellent three-part series all about it. If you want to hear more about the Hormel strike and what happened next at the meatpacking plant, including a mysterious illness that workers contracted in the early 2000s, join me for more episodes about spam at The Experiment, wherever you get podcasts. This Experiment episode was produced by Gabrielle Burbay and me. It was edited by Kelly Prime, Emily Botin, and Catherine Wells.

Fact-checked by Michelle Soraka. Sound design by David Herman. And engineering by Joe Flord. Music was by Tasty Morsels and Alexander Overington. This Planet Money episode was produced by Emma Peasley and was edited by Jess Jiang, with mastering by Isaac Rodriguez. I'm Amanda Aronchik. And I'm Julia Longoria.

This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.