by Ted Genoways
Many Austin locals pointed out that the town—devastated by the farm crisis as well as the strike—would not have survived the Reagan era without the immigrant influx, and that the appearance of Mexican restaurants and bakeries was proof that some Hispanic influences had been embraced. But many more felt, like Hendrycks, that these immigrants had stolen union jobs and were leeching off of government services to which they did not contribute. The immigrants themselves countered that payroll taxes were withheld from their paychecks, though they would never be able to claim Social Security. And if they were injured at work, they would be unlikely to file workers’ compensation claims, for fear they would face firing and receive no backing from the white-run union.
On this one point, Hendrycks seemed to agree with pro-immigrant advocates. These thousands of undocumented immigrants were a perfect corporate workforce: thankful for their paychecks, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionize or even complain. That’s why she called on the Austin Police Department and the Mower County Sheriff’s Office to step up the number of arrests made under the provisions of a new executive order, issued by Governor Pawlenty as part of the run-up to his presidential bid, that effectively deputized local officers in enforcing federal immigration laws. But that wasn’t enough, she said; something had to be done about the federal government.
When an audience member wanted to know why Hormel had never been raided the way that Swift or Agriprocessors had been, Hendrycks suggested a larger conspiracy. “Three times raids were scheduled, and every time, a directive straight from Washington, D.C., called that raid off,” Hendrycks said. She claimed that she had it on direct authority from Mower County sheriff Terese Amazi. Amazi wouldn’t confirm that claim, but she later said, “We’ve sat down with ICE, and they’ve said, ‘We won’t do a raid. Period.’” She told another reporter, “We’re having to build a new jail for a reason.” Amazi’s comments hinted at the deeper message that organizers meant to send. Though they insisted that their aim was squarely on companies like Hormel, Hendrycks kept warning that Austin’s crime numbers were poised to increase unless something drastic was done—unless the “illegals” were sent packing.
At the end of the evening, after the speakers had finished, a local newspaper reporter covering the event asked one of the attendees if he thought it was really the place of local law enforcement to step in, if ICE wasn’t taking the lead. The man, a bus driver from Albert Lea, responded by warning against making the issue “too complicated.”
“It’s like us against them,” he said.
No doubt Dale Chidester was right when he told me that anti-immigrant anger was held-over animosity from an earlier era, but it runs deeper than the strike in the 1980s. Missing from the usual creation myth of P-9, both in union literature and the sanitized corporate history presented at the Spam Museum, is a crucial story, told decades later, of Hormel’s abortive efforts to undercut the all-white workforce with African American workers in the early years of the Great Depression.
At that time, Austin was a segregated town—but divided by class lines, not race, with poor packinghouse workers living on the eastern side of the Cedar River near the plant and the city’s wealthy families living on the far bank with its idyllic Main Street and thriving shops. The arrival of the Great Depression, just as Jay C. Hormel was taking over the family business, widened the schism. Though Jay would come to be romanticized as “the owner who cared,” workers at the time regarded the Princeton-educated son of privilege as a mere inheritor who knew nothing about meatpacking—and they were keen to test his resolve. The unrest grew when slumping sales of canned goods caused the company to post a loss in 1931, its first in three decades, and Jay instituted an across-the-board wage cut without informing workers in advance.
The lost income pushed many Hormel families out of their homes. They erected shacks on the right-of-way easements along either side of the railroad tracks leading to the plant or squatted in an abandoned shed in the nearby brickyard. “We had people that lived in tar paper shacks,” Hormel worker Marie Casey remembered later. “We had ‘skunk hollow,’ where people lived in tents.” Casper Winkels said even before the Depression that Hormel workers made “just enough to pay your room and board, buy a few clothes, and then maybe you’d have a couple of bucks left to go out on a Saturday night and have a little fun.” Now all they could hope for was enough to buy food and some fuel to heat their hovels. It was about this time that Casper and his brother John Winkels began talking with Frank Ellis about organizing the workforce into a formal union. In the midst of this nascent organizing, “Hormel hired 40 niggers,” Winkels remembered, “and they put ’em all in the plant at one time.”
The Winkels brothers had seen this strategy before, he explained. When the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 hit Austin, Union Pacific brought in an entire boxcar of black workers to man the roundhouse. Several of the railway brotherhoods had earlier denied membership to African American workers to appease southern locals; now these excluded workers were only too happy to come north and fill positions, to show leadership that the union needed to protect all workers to sustain a strike. But the Winkels brothers, even in those days, didn’t see it that way.
John Winkels was at a dance in downtown Austin when a cousin arrived to tell him that a mob was forming. Winkels remembered his cousin saying, “We’re gonna chase the niggers out of town.” He handed Winkels a sawed-off shovel handle, and they headed for the railroad yards. There had been violence all over the country that summer, with mobs attacking and killing strikebreakers, so Union Pacific had housed the African American workers in the roundhouse. “We went in there and run the niggers out,” Winkels recalled. “Hit them over the head, you know, and tell them to get going! Albert’s Creek runs through there, and some of them run that way, and we was after them, chased them, and one of them fell in the creek. He got up on his feet and he says, ‘Lordy mercy, if I ever gets on my feet again, I’ll never come in this town again!’” Within a year, a crowd of twenty thousand watched as the Ku Klux Klan initiated four hundred new members at a meeting in an open field outside Austin.
And Winkels told this story to labor historian Roger Horowitz more than seventy-five years later, as context and precursor, a way to explain what he had done almost a decade later when “Hormel hired them forty” in 1931. Winkels and his brother led a group down to the woods on the edge of town, an area locals called the jungle. The story was less animated this time, less detailed, but he didn’t shy away from what they’d done or why. “After supper we got clubs and went down there and we run them out,” he remembered. “After that they didn’t come in no more.”
With a unified, all-white workforce in place, Winkels was able not only to unionize all Hormel workers but also to carry off a strike in 1933 that radically reshaped the labor-management balance in Austin. But the fifty years of labor peace that both sides lionized—and later lamented passing—was built on a shared understanding that the union would come to the bargaining table if Hormel did not bring in scab workers, usually minorities, from outside the community. This became the central, unspoken rule of the Austin local: nonwhite workers would destroy the union.
So what must Pete Winkels, the son of Casper Winkels, have thought when he was fired by Hormel for his participation in the 1980s strike? Pete had grown up on stories of union fights. He had spent nearly two decades in the plant before getting a job as the business agent for the union. When the international union betrayed the local and fired Austin’s leadership, Winkels applied to be reinstated by Hormel but was told that his position no longer existed. While his lawsuit wound its way through court with no support from union leadership, Pete watched as Hormel was subdivided into Quality Pork Processors and his fellow union workers remained unrecalled as the cut-and-kill operation was steadily staffed by fresh workers bused in from Mexico.
Not long after the city council vote in Fremont, John Wiegert got a phone call from Wanda Kotas, who was then the manager of
the local veterans’ club. Both had spoken passionately in favor of the ordinance in the high school auditorium, and both were fuming that the council had suspended the rules to vote early and that Mayor Edwards had cast the deciding vote from a prepared statement—evidence, as they saw it, that the decision had been made ahead of time, that the whole process of gathering the town had been a sham.
“How do you feel?” Kotas asked.
“I’m pretty upset,” Wiegert said.
“Well, it might not be done yet,” Kotas told him. She said she had been contacted by John Copenhaver, an anti-immigration activist in Omaha who had called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which was defeated by Republicans in the House of Representatives, a “blueprint for the destruction of America.” Copenhaver had told Kotas that she should draft a petition to put the ordinance to a public vote. They would need to get three sponsors and then collect three thousand signatures. She wanted to know if Wiegert would sign on as a second petitioner; he quickly agreed and suggested contacting Jerry Hart, the retired IRS auditor who had also spoken at the meeting, to be the third person.
Not long after, Wiegert spotted Hart in the Wal-Mart parking lot, collecting signatures for a pro-ordinance candidate to run against Skip Edwards for mayor. Wiegert honked and waved Hart over to his truck. “Hey, you don’t know me,” he started, but he introduced himself and explained how the petition would work.
“Would you be willing to help out?” he asked.
“You bet,” Hart said.
They had petitions printed up and started collecting signatures. They stood outside the Veterans Club, across the street from the high school football stadium, passing clipboards through car windows as people waited in line to park for the games. They went table to table at the Eagles Club. They divided the city into a grid and went door-to-door. They got a list of registered voters from Charlie Janssen, who had voted for the ordinance as a member of the city council and had just been elected to the state legislature, and started making phone calls; when they found someone willing to sign, they dispatched a runner to drive a petition right to the front door. They got Bob Warner to call his constituents during the day and went out to meet with them at night. When Wiegert’s Christmas break came around at school, he began working full-time. He spent every morning making phone calls and accumulating commitments from citizens willing to add their names to the petition and then ventured out into the snow and cold every afternoon with a list of addresses, driving to each house to collect those signatures.
As the deadline for submitting the petition approached, Hart and Wiegert started to believe they could gather not only the three thousand signatures required but several hundred additional names, in case any were thrown out. Hart published an editorial in the Fremont Tribune, as both a statement of purpose and rallying cry for the measure they were about to put on the ballot. “The more that I look around Fremont, read the paper, talk to people,” he wrote, “the more that I am sickened by what is happening to this town. It disgusts and angers me that this city is being destroyed by the greed of Hormel, Fremont Beef and like minded places.” Two weeks later, Hart, Kotas, and Wiegert submitted their petition—with a total of 3,300 signatures.
At the next city council meeting, however, members voted unanimously to file petition for a declaratory judgment action in the Dodge County District Court, seeking a ruling on whether the proposed ordinance was constitutional. City attorney Skokan argued that the proposed ordinance would be preempted by federal law, would not provide sufficient safeguards to protect constitutional property rights, and would violate the Fair Housing Act. John Copenhaver contacted Kris Kobach to see if he would represent the three petitioners. Kobach drove up to Fremont from Kansas, along with representatives from FAIR in Washington, and met with Wiegert and Hart at the Big Red Keno Club, not far from Wiegert’s house. Over burgers and fries, Kobach offered to represent them pro bono.
Remembering that moment later, Kobach said he had made the offer because he was touched by what he saw in Fremont. “It was a refreshing vignette,” he began then stopped himself. “No, let me use the English word—a refreshing little picture of citizens who were taking this issue on, who were trying to get expert help, and who were just delighted that I was willing to help them.” He said he would waive his fee on the sole condition that the petitioners totally commit to the case, with the full knowledge that it could be a protracted fight.
“We’re willing to help you out,” Kobach said, “but you just have to promise that you don’t get cold feet halfway through—because this could take several years.”
Wiegert told him not to worry. “Once I get started on something,” he said, “I go through with it.”
At the end of November 2008, a group of about twenty picketers gathered on Hormel Drive outside QPP. They held signs that read: HORMEL AND QPP GUILTY FOR OUR DISEASE and SCIENCE DOESN’T HAVE CURE FOR OUR DISEASE. Centro Campesino, the Hispanic cultural center assisting immigrants suffering from PIN, issued a statement alleging that QPP and Hormel had been ignoring the concerns of sick workers, violated their work restrictions, and, in some cases, simply fired employees who could no longer work. Centro Campesino called on QPP to make amends, demanding the rehiring of fired workers and taking “appropriate steps to assure access to workers’ compensation benefits for all the affected employees.”
Roberto Olmedo-Hernandez—a father of three in his late thirties who had worked until March at the viscera station, opening and draining pigs’ stomachs—sat hunkered against the wind, a dark scowl on his face. He told reporters that he had been reassigned to light duty in the laundry room at QPP but still struggled with “intense fatigue, headaches and foot pain.” He said that doctors at both the Mayo Clinic and Austin Medical Center had run multiple tests on him, but none knew how to help him—and his symptoms were worsening. Once, he had gotten into an argument with Dr. Lachance, accusing him of working for Hormel. “People are scared,” he explained to reporters. “I’m not scared for myself now, but my kids, my wife. My kids are asking me if I’m going to die.”
When the local newspaper in Austin reached Kelly Wadding for comment, he was clearly shocked by the negative press. The public attention, up until that point, had been almost universally positive. Now Wadding acknowledged that he had been contacted by Centro Campesino and said he had done his best to address their concerns. “They made a lot of accusations,” he said, “but they didn’t give me any names or any specifics.” He insisted that he knew of no instances in which supervisors had not honored employees’ work restrictions and no instances of anyone with the disorder being denied workers’ compensation. Wadding did acknowledge that some workers had been fired when they couldn’t provide documentation of legal work status. But he steadfastly maintained that he knew of “no one that was fired” because they had filed claims against the company.
And yet, during the week that followed the small protest, several additional workers who had filed workers’ compensation claims were summoned to the office of Dale Wicks, director of human resources, to answer questions about their immigration status. Among them was Pablo Ruiz. As with Miriam Angeles—and, by then, several other workers—Ruiz was informed that QPP had received an inquiry from ICE about his immigration status. The company, Wicks said, had reason to believe that Ruiz had filed a false job application and was working in the country illegally.
Ruiz was stunned. He had grown up in Mexico within sight of the Rio Grande, but when he was ten years old, he crossed the river with his parents and went to work in the fields of South Texas—on a legal temporary agricultural worker visa. “I was so young that they got to go to the lawyer and get a couple of witnesses, and the farmer signed the papers,” Ruiz told me. In 1996, when he turned eighteen, he applied for full citizenship, and it was granted.
Now he looked back on his job interview at QPP, many years before, and suspected that key questions were subtle ways of trying to assess his immigration status. “When was I last in
Mexico?” he gave as an example. “Are my parents there? It’s kind of tricky.” He told me that, he believes, QPP had assumed for nine years that he was working without proper documentation—and, once they realized the extent of his injuries, had tried to dupe him into fleeing for fear of deportation. Ruiz stiffened and told Wicks what he later told me: “I’m a citizen since 1996 so with me there is no problem with that.”
Wicks apologized for the error and told Ruiz he could go—but Pablo Ruiz’s problems were just beginning.
Part Three
Chapter 7
FROM SEED TO SLAUGHTER
On September 15, 2008, Lynn Becker got the phone call every hog farmer fears.
For months on end, pork producers across the Midwest had been struggling against record-low prices per head, but Becker had taken steps to protect his family’s farm against contractions of the market. He had signed a producer agreement with Hormel Foods, maybe the one company with a recession-proof demand for pork, and he had planted enough of his own corn to sustain his herd for the next year, insulating his operation from skyrocketing feed prices. With another Minnesota winter already in the air, Becker was out walking his fields one last time before starting the harvest. “When I got in and checked the answering machine,” he told me later, “there was a message from Matt Prescott with PETA.” Becker was soft-spoken but bristled with nervous energy. His jitters, together with his work-honed physique and fair hair, made him seem much younger than forty. But he insisted that the four years since receiving the call from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had aged him by more than a decade. “They had ‘damning evidence,’” he said haltingly. “Undercover. Of animal abuse. On a farm that we own.”
