<div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">The struggle of Local P-9 that Peter Rachleff chronicled in Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (1993, <<a href="http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/HardPressed">http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/HardPressed</a>>) and Barbara Kopple captured in American Dream (1990) was probably the old union rank and file's last stand.  And they lost, for most of the rest of the American working class failed to stand in solidarity with them, and here's the result.</blockquote> <div> </div> <div>The idea that the workers at this one plant in a small town in minnesota 'lost because the american working class failed to stand in solidarity with them' is not a useful way to think about labor power.  The way leftos misunderstand what happened in austin minnesota says a lot about our failure as a political tendency with respect to the larger labor movement in the US.  </div> <div> </div> <div> Meatpacking is a perfect example of one of the old types of previously unionized, high-wage jobs that was converted to a non-union low-wage sweatshop industry NOT because the jobs moved to China, but because of an inadequate union response to changing conditions, economic crisis in the industry and ruthless management offensive.  'Inadequate' is really too kind of a word for the mixture of incompetence, corruption, short-sightedness etc that characterize the actions of the many unions who were facing problems besides offshoring throughout the eighties, but I try to temper harsh words knowing that many, many of the workers, activists, staff and leaders in the unions then tried very hard, did some heroic things, and had a perfect storm of political reaction and global industrial change to contend with.   However, the narrative around meatpacking and the Austin Hormel strike has been just as inadequate in understanding what happened.   The labor-left in general, instead of articulating a strategic understanding of the things that were happening in many of these industries that could be applied to a successful rebuilding strategy, instead mostly did the following: pick battles that were in the economic big picture industrially unwinnable but were very dramatic and evidenced a lot of working-class heroism, champion them by writing about them, and then chalk the predictable catastrophic losses that resulted to personal failings of individuals involved ("sellout union buearacrats," "the rest of the working class failed to get behind these people in this one small town," "person X involved was really evil, and the workers would have won otherwise, especially if they became socialists.").   That sounds harsh, and I'm not saying that these weren't very compelling stories for leftists to tell and champion.  But the record is one of almost uniform failure on the part of not just the unions but their expert fans on the left.   Austin P-9 is the standout example of this.  That loss has probably the highest ratio of pages written about it and media done on it to actual workers involved--- but almost zero of that attention focused on the plain reality:   Austin P-9 at Hormel, and many other less-noticed meatpacking strike losses, was a battle that was lost before it began, because UFCW allowed its union density to drop precipitously in meatpacking leading up to the 80s, then failed to marshal its political strength to stop or slow the Reagan reaction, and then never crafted a competent industry-wide strategy to rebuild and re-organize and live to fight another day.   Numbers don't lie--- when the math is set up like it was in Austin (or Decatur or Clifton AZ or Homestead or), no amount of bravery or corruption change your end result either way measurably.      Thank god, UFCW has pulled its act together a bit (just a bit), and now are trying to dig out an organizing victory or two in meatpacking on the road to re-unionizing, with a largely latino workforce now.   When latinos, documented and un-, eventually have a place in a unionized, higher-wage meatpacking industry and their union can use its political bulk to adequately serve the interests of its members, that will be a big step to limiting the draconian horrors of our current immigration system which hurts the folks here already and the folks coming. </div>  </div>