by Ted Genoways
Strong sales of Hormel’s new product lines kept the company afloat—but workers were dissatisfied that their wages had not risen along with profits. In 1932, Joe Ollman and John Winkels on the hog kill teamed up with Frank Ellis, the foreman of the hog-casing department, to begin organizing plant employees under the International Union of All Workers. About the same time, Jay Hormel made a rare miscalculation. Seeking to reduce turnover on the line, he instituted a progressive pension plan, something he regarded as an incentive to stay with Hormel. After all, the company would contribute $1 every week toward retirement and life insurance, against just 20 cents deducted from each worker’s paycheck. But Jay didn’t bother pitching the plan to employees; he simply instructed foremen to strong-arm workers into signing membership cards—a style of leadership he later rued as “benevolent dictatorship.” When the supervisor on the hog kill buttonholed one worker and forced him to sign, labor organizers incited a ten-minute work stoppage until the foreman tore up the man’s membership card.
When rumor of the incident spread through the plant, it was enough to spur enormous turnout for a union rally in Sutton Park. Impassioned speeches from Ellis and Ollman convinced six hundred Hormel workers to sign up on the spot, and talk arose of organizing workers throughout Austin. Local business leaders panicked. Jay Hormel urged them to accept union labor. “I am not going to get mixed up in a fight in my hometown,” he declared. But other businesses refused to allow their workers to organize, and Hormel was reluctant to put himself at a competitive disadvantage. “He suggested that we go out and organize the other packing plants first,” Frank Ellis later remembered. “We told Mr. Hormel that we would organize the other plants, but needed more money now; higher wages was our problem and competition was his.”
In November 1933, Ellis and other union organizers, armed with pipes and clubs, escorted Hormel from the general offices and shut down the plant’s refrigeration system—threatening to spoil $3.6 million of meat. For three straight days, Hormel went to the picket line to meet with union leaders and address workers from an improvised platform. He brought the strike to a quick end by accepting a series of forward-looking incentives, including profit sharing, merit pay, and the “Annual Wage Plan,” an unheard-of salary system in an industry dominated by piecework and hourly rates. Hormel also agreed that increases in output would result in more pay for workers, and he even guaranteed them fifty-two weeks’ notice prior to termination.
Perhaps most importantly, Hormel recognized the newly formed union. “I couldn’t lick you, so I joined you,” he told them. The concessions earned him a matchless period of management-labor harmony, but Fortune derided Hormel as the “red capitalist”—and the Depression was cutting deeper and deeper into fresh and cured meat sales. Paying high wages for slow-selling products was eating up Hormel’s profit, and lower sales meant less money to pay workers. When Jay attempted layoffs, he was met with a sit-down strike in 1934. To keep workers on the line and improve his margins by reducing waste, he devised yet another canned product, this one made from ground-up scrap meat.
But like everything in Austin, it first needed a new name. He called it Spam.
Just as Emiliano Ballesta’s shift at QPP was ending on February 12, 2007, a massive blizzard came sweeping down from Canada. Snow shifted and swirled across Interstate 90. By the time Ballesta reached his mobile home west of the highway on the outskirts of Austin, drifts were starting to pile up, and he entered to find that the pipes had frozen solid. Worried about his wife and five children—most of all, his five-year-old son, who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia—Ballesta shimmied into the crawl space with a pair of small kerosene heaters. Instead of thawing the pipes, he ignited the wispy insulation hanging from the floorboards, and, in no time, flames engulfed the trailer. When police and firefighters responded to the call, they found thick smoke rolling from under the eaves, Ballesta and his family unharmed but watching helplessly as everything they owned burned. By morning, nothing remained but a blackened hull.
The family bounced around after that, crashing with friends and family, sleeping on couches and floors for weeks at a stretch. Ballesta’s most pressing concern was making sure that his oldest son, a senior at Austin High School, graduated on time and that the rest of his children had a place to sleep. To save up enough to make rent on an apartment of their own and replace some of their belongings, Ballesta started taking extra overtime hours at QPP. He had been working at the plant since 1994, most of that time at the head table, chiseling meat from the cheeks and jowls of hogs’ heads. Despite his experience and despite the fact that recent immigrants on the line regarded him as something of a father figure, Ballesta was only making $12.75 an hour—barely a $26,500 base salary. But he had worked Saturdays to pick up overtime for as long as he could remember, and lately there was plenty available.
As the recession took hold, both Hormel and QPP offered more and more hours to workers. Hormel employees told the New York Times that they’d never seen so much overtime. One worker boasted that he’d been able to buy a new TV and refrigerator with his additional pay. Though head meat goes into sausage, not Spam, the increased production of one item increases output of everything else. So as Hormel increased production of ham and shoulder for Spam, Ballesta was racking up overtime hours at the head table, too—so many hours, in fact, that he could afford to move his family into a rented house not far from the plant. And his son graduated right on schedule.
In May 2007, Ballesta was at the commencement ceremony when he noticed his legs starting to feel tight and numb. Within days, his right hip and thigh were throbbing, and it was as if the soles of his feet were on fire. At first, he chalked it up to fatigue, so many extra hours standing, but soon he was having trouble walking from the QPP parking lot to the plant door. He could barely make it to the locker rooms on the top floor, dragging up the staircase by pulling himself on the steel handrail.
Ballesta didn’t know it, but he wasn’t alone. Miriam Angeles, who worked near the head table removing remnants of spinal cords, had started having burning pain in her lower legs, too, and now her right arm had begun falling asleep—both at work and at home, when she tried to nurse her infant daughter. Mariana Martinez, who floated from station to station filling in for sick workers, had been spending most of her days at the head table since March, and now she too was suffering from headaches, backaches, weak legs, and burning feet. Susan Kruse, the woman who stood on the other side of the Plexiglas shield from Matthew Garcia, clearing neck meat from the aperture where the spinal cord enters the skull, had a knot in her left calf that wouldn’t go away. When the cramps spread to her right leg, and stiffness in her hands turned to tingling, Kruse finally went to the doctor.
In the meantime, Mayo doctors had prescribed Garcia a steroid to calm his nerve inflammation, and he’d improved enough to lift himself from his wheelchair and get around without a walker. He still hadn’t regained pelvic floor function, robbing him of bowel control and forcing him to insert a urinary catheter each morning, but he managed to return to work at QPP. Garcia was sent to the box room, where he unloaded pallets of cardboard to be assembled for shipping, but he could only stomach half shifts before the pain was too much and he had to go home to bed. While he was out, the harvesting of brains continued. Some days his spot was filled by Mariana Martinez, but usually another worker, a young woman named Santa Zapata, took over threading twenty skulls per minute onto the brass nozzle of the brain machine.
From its conception in 1937, Spam served a business function, not a market demand. If Hormel was going to pay workers guaranteed wages and promise to make no seasonal layoffs, then Jay Hormel reasoned that those workers should be assigned to tasks previously considered too time-consuming to be cost-effective. For decades, the company had discarded thousands of pounds of pork shoulder deemed unworthy of the effort it required to cut it off the bone. But now, Jay surmised that the cost of additional wages would be offset if Hormel could simply convince customers
to buy that scrap meat. The company already had established a thriving market for canned hams, first developed by Hormel in 1926. But Jay understood that consumers had gone for that product because, once removed from the tin, the ham inside looked like what they could buy at their local meat counter. No one went to the butcher shop to buy loose pork shoulder and fat trimmings. So Hormel’s meat scientists came up with the idea of spicing the shoulder and cooking it into a loaf.
The technical team made two early decisions. First, to appeal to pennywise housewives, the loaf would be twelve ounces—enough to feed a family of five for dinner, with leftovers for sandwiches the next day. Second, to create the impression that the product was a modern innovation, not just an attempt to repackage waste, it would come in a rectangular block, made to fit on a slice of square sandwich bread like that first nationally marketed by Wonder Bread in 1930. According to legend, Julius A. Zillgitt went to the Square Deal Grocery on Main Street in Austin and found a square can of Mazola. He filled the tin with meat, sealed it, and cooked it. But when he opened the can, he found eight ounces of rock-hard meat and four ounces of water. This was only the first of countless setbacks. The Hormel newsletter later itemized the litany of troubles that plagued early development: “the can, the solder, the seam, the fill, the mix, the cure, the age of the pig, the feed of the pig, the cast of the moon.” The eventual solution is still a tightly held secret, but it involved vacuum mixing, quick sealing, and pressure-cooking. Zillgitt was ultimately awarded share of a patent for a new process and specially designed machine devised “for browning and forming solid meat.”
Now all Jay Hormel had to do was convince the public to eat it. So on New Year’s Eve 1936, he threw a party at his twenty-six-bedroom mansion on the eastern edge of Austin. Each guest was greeted at the door with a clutch of blank cards and then offered a new, nameless pork shoulder loaf, prepared in several ways—chopped into squares and poked with toothpicks, diced up into salad, sliced and fried. To get a cocktail, everyone first had to write an idea for the product’s name on one of their cards. The first ideas were too literal. But Jay later joked that “along about the fourth or fifth drink they began showing some imagination.” Kenneth Daigneau, a New York actor in town for the holidays to visit his brother, Hormel’s vice president, hit upon “Spam”—a play on the spiced meat loaf and its hamlike appearance. The name was officially registered as a trademark on May 11, 1937.
To launch the product, Hormel’s marketing team took out four-color ads in all the ladies’ and home magazines. They sent out groups of young sales executives, dubbed “Spam Crews,” to promote their new product to wholesalers and local markets across the country. They launched the Dollar Bill Campaign, going town to town offering one dollar for opinions of Spam, then publishing the most positive comments in the next day’s newspaper. They even arranged for George Burns and Gracie Allen to promote Hormel on their popular radio show. By 1940, Spam was being eaten in 70 percent of the urban homes in America.
And after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hormel secured a contract with the military to supply Spam to every hungry GI around the world. With the government go-ahead to substitute potent sodium nitrite for traditional sodium chloride, Hormel could crank out a product that would keep indefinitely. The company sent K-rations up supply lines across the Pacific and secured Spam acclaim as the “meat that won the war.” Never mind that GIs hated the stuff and flooded Jay with hate mail, which he kept in a drawer he called the Scurrilous File. “If they think Spam is terrible,” he told the New Yorker in 1945, “they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had during the last war.” When peace arrived, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote Hormel: “I ate my share of Spam along with millions of other soldiers. I’ll even confess to a few unkind remarks about it—uttered during the strain of battle, you understand. But as former Commander in Chief, I believe I can still forgive you your only sin: sending us so much of it.”
Hormel won the forgiveness of other veterans when the company created a special workers program, in which up to 15 percent of the workforce could be given light duty if disabled. And there was plenty of work. Spam’s unflagging production sustained war-crippled Europe in the 1950s. More than that, it cemented Spam’s place in the popular imagination of Blitz babies. Monty Python’s famed skit (the one playing on an infinite loop at the Spam Museum), in which Spam is cooked into every menu item at a London greasy spoon, was a riff on the inescapability of the canned meat in the British diet under food rationing. For American baby boomers, too, Spam became a symbol of America’s postwar love affair with processed food—and an emblem of how America’s industrial might meant that workers enjoyed a stable, middle-class existence.
But all that started to change when Jay Hormel died in 1954 and the company passed out of family hands and came under new corporate leadership that wasn’t interested in continuing his progressive benefits. In 1975, future president Richard Knowlton began to negotiate a new contract with the union on the promise that Hormel would build a new plant that would reduce workloads. In fact, the new plant allowed Knowlton to gut long-standing incentive programs and increase line speeds. That led to a bitter strike—and completed the transition from George A. HOR-mel & Company, the family business, to Hor-MEL, the corporation where a new pronunciation was embraced as part of a new identity. But that era was about more than rebranding. It was the start of false identities meant to duck standing contracts and future responsibilities; this was when everyone learned to speak the local dialect of truth, when the cut-and-kill side of the operation became Quality Pork Processors and the workforce became populated with undocumented immigrants working under fake names.
In September 2007, Richard Schindler, a family care physician at the Austin Medical Center branch of the Mayo Clinic, sent a group email to four colleagues in neurology in Rochester, outlining the details of an emerging case. “There are several disturbing facts involved,” Schindler wrote. Nearly a dozen patients had come to him in the last year with symptoms consistent with something like the rare disorder chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP)—death of the peripheral nerves caused by damage to the fatty neural covering known as the myelin sheath. None of the patients had previous histories of serious illness, and all were young and (with only one exception) Hispanic.
Most troubling, he wrote, the patients all worked on the cut line at Quality Pork Processors—a detail that had just recently been discovered and then only by chance. Nearly all of the patients were too weak to drive and were getting to their doctor’s appointments using a car service run by Colombian-born Walter Schwartz, and in the doctor’s office they were relying on translation services offered by the medical center’s Spanish interpreter, Carol Hidalgo. Schwartz and Hidalgo noticed the similarity of symptoms, and when Schwartz told her that he had been scheduling appointments for all of these patients around their work schedules at QPP, Hidalgo decided to bring it to the attention of Dr. Schindler.
Schindler interviewed the patients and discovered that they not only worked at QPP but very near one another; many were posted at the head table or nearby. He contacted Carole Bower, the plant’s occupational nurse, who reported that she had been noticing workers whose feet were so tender that they struggled with the stairs to the top-floor locker rooms, high above the roar of the factory line. She referred six workers to Schindler. Among them was Matthew Garcia, who, after a few weeks working in the box room, had returned to his station running the brain machine—first working four-hour half shifts, then building up to six-hour days—but his symptoms soon returned. He began falling on the plant floor, his legs numb and motionless under him. Schindler found that Garcia and Santa Zapata, the woman who replaced him on the brain machine, were the most advanced cases. “Sounds like this needs more investigation,” Schindler concluded in his email. “Suggestions on how to proceed with this?”
Daniel Lachance, one of the neurologists Schindler contacted, was intrigued by the case histories the email described. Schindler’s a
ccount reminded Lachance of a case in 2005, when he had treated a woman for carpal tunnel syndrome. After reviewing her electromyogram and other tests, Lachance had suspected something more—that her carpal tunnel was not compressing her median nerve but rather that the nerves of her hands themselves were inflamed. But her test results didn’t match any known disorders. Like the patients Schindler was treating, that woman had been young, Hispanic, and previously healthy—but she had returned to Mexico before her spinal fluid could be tested. Lachance remembered Garcia, too, from his hospitalization the year before. Steroids had helped reduce the swelling of his nerves, but doctors could never identify the cause of his spinal inflammation. Lachance hadn’t considered employment history during his initial treatment for either patient, but on checking the medical files, he discovered that both had worked at QPP.
Lachance had been doing neurology consults in Austin, so he had access to the records for these new patients and decided to dig deeper. He discovered that Garcia was among this new group of patients and that the others, just as Schindler described, also appeared to be suffering from similar symptoms. But the diagnosis of CIDP struck Lachance as a mathematical impossibility. “Those types of illness seem to, statistically, come up in the population at a rate of two per hundred thousand,” Lachance told me later. “So here, over the course of a couple of months, I was aware of up to a dozen individuals from one town of twenty-two thousand who all happened to work in one place.”
