Hormel Strikes

During its 115-year history, Hormel Foods has encountered just two labor strikes, both while incorporated as Geo. A. Hormel & Co. The two strikes frame the history of strikes as a method of forcing management to meet the demands of labor, the first in 1933 demonstrating early success in the meat packing industry and the latter in 1985 and 1986, exhibiting the demise of strikes' effectiveness.

George Hormel founded his firm in the southeastern Minnesota town of Austin in 1891. It began with fresh meat products, added SPAM luncheon meat in 1933, and today is more heavily invested in value-added products.

Early workers had been reared on area farms and continued to farm part-time or seasonally while slaughtering and butchering hogs, beef, and sheep into various fresh meat products. However, the Great Depression brought men to the plant who would otherwise have found employment in business or the professions, which significantly altered the demographics of the workforce with better educated and more assertive men. Moreover, labor activist Frank Ellis, who had fortuitously gained employment as a foreman, recruited fellow activists who had been fired from other packing houses consequent to their laborite activities and surreptitiously positioned them throughout the plant.

In 1933, Ellis ambitiously conceived a labor union that would embrace employees of all industries and encompass entire communities. Appropriately naming it the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW), the new union soon spread to neighboring Albert Lea with its Wilson Company plant, and from there to several Midwestern meat-packing cities. At one time the Austin local unionized all but four major employers, including such unassociated laborers as retail clerks and beauty shop hairdressers.

Hormel workers became angry when the company assigned a wage increase to their pension plans, and they used the charge of pressure to contribute to the community chest as a basis for protest. In September, they demanded recognition of their union and threatened to strike. Jay Hormel, who had in 1927 succeeded his father as company president, countered this with a lockout and skirmishes with police and plant guards resulted. At this, Hormel backed off and agreed to recognition, collective bargaining, seniority rules, and grievance procedures.

When the company failed to follow through, Ellis assembled a union meeting on November 10 and persuaded members to authorize a strike to send a message to the company. Even before he could use the strike-vote to confront Jay Hormel, a gang of union members—as much drunk with empowerment as with alcohol—rushed to the plant where the sheep-kill crew was working the night shift. These zealous unionists (incorrectly) announced the union was already on strike. Excited that action had finally begun, they walked out and, seeing this, other workers joined them. Ironically, union leaders had inspired a strike, but it was rank-and-file who put it into action.

The next day, strikers broke into the plant with clubs, drove out foremen and everyone still working, broke up a meeting of company executives, and ushered Jay Hormel out of his office. Then they shut down refrigeration that contained $3.6 million worth of meat and blocked all operations.

...