The aftermath of the P-9 strike
IN RESPONSE to "No retreat, no surrender": I grew up in Austin, Minn. Although I was only 5 years old at the time of the strike, the effects are still readily apparent.
In my grandparents' time, a job on the line at Hormel meant that your household only needed one income to live in a nice house, buy a new car every few years and send at least one kid to college.
By the time I graduated high school and moved away in 1998, applying for a job at the plant was the last resort for those who couldn't find better-paying work as mechanics, carpenters and the like. Hormel workers, even with a spouse earning a similar income, now struggle to make ends meet.
Needless to say, Hormel's profits have only increased as the lifeblood has been sucked from a once-thriving city. In the last few years, Hormel (and Quality Pork, which I believe is technically a separate entity, but whose sole purpose is to do the actual slaughtering before Hormel processes the meat) has increasingly hired newly arrived immigrants from Latin America and Africa.
The amount of virulent racism is staggering. Long-time residents blame the immigrants for the increase in crime, drug abuse and alcoholism, and the decline in property values. Everyone who speaks with an accent and looks darker than the native Scandinavians is assumed to be "illegal." Hormel is rarely criticized for taking advantage of cheaper immigrant labor; all of the blame is heaped on the "illegals" for taking "our" jobs.
The current union is rarely discussed. The impression I get is that workers too young or too recently arrived to remember the strike regard their union as just another useless bureaucracy.
The capitalist propaganda machine, with nary a peep from the union, has excelled in its efforts to create a situation where white workers see brown workers as the enemy, rather than as potential comrades. Immigrant workers are (justifiably) afraid that union activity will result in firing and possible deportation.
Unfortunately, none of this is unique to Austin. Workers all over the country deal with identical problems in their own hometowns. "Us against Them" should mean workers against bosses, but in Austin, like so many other places, it has become "Us against Us."
Ryan Lansing, Tafuna, American Samoa
