Enough is Enough
The local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (P-9) were a group of passionate individuals that lived metaphorically by the words of “No Surrender” by Bruce Springsteen while they were striking against Hormel at the Austin, Minessota site. Director Barbara Kopple followed the Hormel strike for a couple of years in order to create the Academy Award winning documentary American Dream. The documentary shows the world a first hand experience of the struggles that workers in the meat packing industry had in the 1980s. Due to the recession, and although in 1984 they had a profit of 29.5 million dollars, in 1985 Hormel decided that in order to remain competitive the company they had to conduct large wage cuts. …show more content…
Charles Nyberg, Chief Council of Hormel & Co. stated that,
Ray rogers does not use traditional collective bargaining, his traditional approaches are harassment, intimidation, and threats. And his rationale for that model of approaching an employer is that if you can embarrass a company hard enough and long enough,you 'll that company to its knees and they will agree to the terms and conditions of his client unions the ones that he represents.”
In addition, Lewie Andersion, Director of the Meatpacking Divison in the United Food and Commerical Workers International Union (P-9’s parent union) believed that doing a corporate campaign will lose the Union members their jobs. Although P-9 was extremely passionate to hire Rogers, I feel as though that was not the right move in order to settle with Hormel and keep a good relationship. The international Union offered their expertise and negotiation skills, but P-9 wanted to escalate the issues at hand immedietly. As much as I sympathized with the P-9 members, they lost my respect the second they didn’t follow the “chain of command” and let the international union help them appropriately. Hormel then proposed an offer that would slowly phase out higher payed workers as new workers would be payed $2 less for the same work, but the final offer was rejected by both the local and international unions. The P-9 workers decided that “Enough is
The local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (P-9) were a group of passionate individuals that lived metaphorically by the words of “No Surrender” by Bruce Springsteen while they were striking against Hormel at the Austin, Minessota site. Director Barbara Kopple followed the Hormel strike for a couple of years in order to create the Academy Award winning documentary American Dream. The documentary shows the world a first hand experience of the struggles that workers in the meat packing industry had in the 1980s. Due to the recession, and although in 1984 they had a profit of 29.5 million dollars, in 1985 Hormel decided that in order to remain competitive the company they had to conduct large wage cuts. …show more content…
Charles Nyberg, Chief Council of Hormel & Co. stated that,
Ray rogers does not use traditional collective bargaining, his traditional approaches are harassment, intimidation, and threats. And his rationale for that model of approaching an employer is that if you can embarrass a company hard enough and long enough,you 'll that company to its knees and they will agree to the terms and conditions of his client unions the ones that he represents.”
In addition, Lewie Andersion, Director of the Meatpacking Divison in the United Food and Commerical Workers International Union (P-9’s parent union) believed that doing a corporate campaign will lose the Union members their jobs. Although P-9 was extremely passionate to hire Rogers, I feel as though that was not the right move in order to settle with Hormel and keep a good relationship. The international Union offered their expertise and negotiation skills, but P-9 wanted to escalate the issues at hand immedietly. As much as I sympathized with the P-9 members, they lost my respect the second they didn’t follow the “chain of command” and let the international union help them appropriately. Hormel then proposed an offer that would slowly phase out higher payed workers as new workers would be payed $2 less for the same work, but the final offer was rejected by both the local and international unions. The P-9 workers decided that “Enough is