August 31: Supporting the Hormel Strikers

On this date in 1985, Peter Rachleff, professor of history at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, led the first food caravan of the Twin Cities P-9 Support Committee to Austin, Minnesota, to bring more than 100 tons of food to the 1,700 Hormel meatpackers, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, who were on strike. The strike would last over a year and half and involve mass picketing, the deployment of National Guard troops to break the picket lines, hundreds of arrests, and the firing of more than 1,000 workers. “Only the strikers’ courage and determination kept thousands of us from becoming hopeless cynics in the wake of the strike and its defeat,” wrote Rachleff in Dollars & Sense. Rachleff is author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement.

“In place of the panoply of alphabet soup agencies created by Roosevelt’s New Deal—WPA, CCC, TVA, FTP—and the new labor organizations affiliated with the CIO, workers’ lives now take place in the shadows of NAFTA, WTO, IMF, and the World Bank. 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.” —Peter Rachleff