Why Corporate Campaign's tactics can't win strikes

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UNFAIR Carl Finamore Socialist Actior P-9 strikers and supporters at the Jan. 29, 1986, mass picketline that shut down Hormel for one day. This was one of the few instances of mass picketing and it was primarily organized by solidarity activists. 4 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1988 Below we are reprinting a chapter from the newly published pamphlet, "Lessons of the P-9 Strike," by Jake Cooper.

The strike by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local P-9 packinghouse workers against George A. Hormel & Co. in Austin, Minn., began in August 1985 and lasted for over one year.

This struggle received exceptional attention from all sides concerned with the fight against employers' demands for concessions from the unions, and won wide support from union-conscious workers throughout the country. In the course of the strike, the P-9 workers had to face the combined onslaught of the cops, the courts, and the National Guard.

The strike was betrayed from the beginning by both the UFCW bureaucracy and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, who collaborated with Hormel in their role as strikebreakers.

The chapter reprinted below, titled "Corporate Campaign: an erroneous strategy," deals with the failure of the P-9 leadership to mobilize the membership in mass picketlines to close down the Hormel plant in Austin after it was reopened in January 1986.

Underlying this was the union's adoption of the strategy of the Corporate Campaign, Inc. Headed by Ray Rogers, who was hired by P-9 to plan strike tactics, the Corporate Campaign's "new tactics" were based on the premise that strikes could no longer be won on the picketline. Instead, Rogers and the Corporate Campaign sought to counterpose a public-relations campaign and civil-disobedience stunts to the vital necessity of closing down the Hormel plant through mass picketlines.

The chapter below is an analysis of the impasse the union found itself in after the Hormel plant was reopened under the protection of the Minnesota National Guard.

In defiance of the forces arrayed against them, P-9 was determined to carry on the fight. The members saw themselves-and rightfully so—as the vanguard against the concessions offensive of the corporations. As a result, they enjoyed the passionate support of class-conscious workers everyJake Cooper is a veteran of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike; was a personal guard for Leon Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico; was imprisoned under the Smith Act in 1944; was the chairperson of the Metro P-9 Strike Support Committee during the 1985-86 Hormel strike; and is a national committee member of Socialist Action.

LIL* Harrel where. But unfortunately, the union was saddled with an incorrect strategy for winning the strike.

The P-9 leadership-and the membership, although with some grumblings and reservations-followed the Corporate Campaign strategy to the letter.

Ray Rogers' "corporate campaign" or "new tactics" was based on the judgment that strikes in the past period, such as the Phelps-Dodge, Greyhound, Caterpillar Tractor, and Con Edison strikes, were defeated because the old methods of struggle no longer worked. Rogers believed that the way to defeat union-busting companies was to cut-off their power base at the banks, holding companies, and other industries that have a financial interest in the struck company.

"Corporate Campaigners," however, fail to appreciate the high degree of class consciousness of these masters of finance and industry. Their leaders—unlike the "leadership" of the workers—do not delude themselves with the myth of common interests between capital and labor. They see clearly what their interests require, and are not easily pitted one against the other.

What "Corporate Campaigners" also fail to take into consideration is the history of the labor movement and how it was built. The big union struggles of the 1930s, like the Teamsters strike in Minneapolisthe This pamphlet examines the main lessons of the 1985-86 P-9 strike against Geo. A. Hormel & Co. It focuses on the role of the company, the government, the courts, and the labor bureaucracy in helping to break the strike. It also examines the crucial questions of strike strategy employed by the P-9 leadership.

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Army St., Suite 308, San Francisco, CA 94110 Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, the Longshoremen's and Seamen's strike in San Francisco, the Hormel strike in 1933, and the militant strikes of coal miners and mass production workers in the auto, rubber, electrical, and other giant industries— were won by closing down the plants and using the mobilizations of the workers to keep them closed.

One of the corporate campaign's justifications for "new tactics" is that anti-labor legislation enacted since the 1930s has eroded the power of the unions. This is less than half true. First, when the 1930s labor upsurge began, the laws in effect were no less anti-labor. Second, the muchdeplored anti-labor legislation was enacted without any attempt at effective resistance by the labor bureaucracy. To this day, labor's misleadership meekly obeys laws that would fall like a house of cards in the face of determined mass defiance.

"Corporate Campaigners" are also under the misapprehension that "Corporate Greed," as they call it, is a "policy." But the irrefutable drive to constantly increase the rate of profit is not a "policy." It is intrinsic to capitalism, its categorical imperative.

Fight at the point of production The strategy of P-9's Corporate Campaign, led by Ray Rogers, boiled down to waging a serious fight everywhere but at the plant gate in Austin. Rogers' tactics for mobilizing financial and moral support wherever possible were a positive and traditional union strike tactic. But from the moment Hormel announced they would renew operations at the Austin plant, the P-9 leadership desperately needed to shift its emphasis to take up the challenge and mobilize mass support to meet this deadly threat.

From that moment, beefing up the picketline to keep the plant closed was a dire and irreplaceable necessity. But Ray Rogers' corporate campaign excluded the tactic of effective picketing to stop the strikebreaking. The P-9 leadership made the fatal error of believing they could win without shutting down the plant. In the last analysis, they were intimidated by the long string of defeats the labor movement had suffered.

While strikebreakers were being herded into the plant under National Guard protection, Ray Rogers outlined his plans for resistance at a P-9 membership meeting. His prescription was to emulate the tactics of the Gandhi movement in India and the Black civil rights movement in the United States.

"If it becomes necessary," Rogers told Pmembers at a union meeting after Hormel reopened, "we'll be asking everyone in this room to lay down in front of those plant gates. Men, women and children will have to go to jail. But I guarantee your support will increase tremendously."

Rogers wanted P-9 members to block the gate a few at a time, and then be arrested. "The jails can't hold them all," he said. But the jails could hold them all. And workers can't conduct a struggle if they're in jail.

Confusion about the stakes While advocating the tactics employed by the civil rights movement, Ray Rogers failed to grasp the source of the enormous power of the Black struggle for equality. The Black civil rights struggle was a fight for social equality and justice against Jim Crow, the system of legalized segregation in the South. It was a mass struggle for elementary democratic rights against the Southern Jim Crow laws.

The moral authority of the civil rights movement was assured from the beginning because it exposed the hypocrisy of so-called American democracy. The tactic of mass civil disobedience and mass passive resistance employed by millions of Black men, women and children throughout the South in the early 1960s cannot be seen apart from the simmering anger of the urban Black working class, which was reflected in the massive and legal march on Washington, D.C., in 1963, and the explosions in the Black ghettos during the summer of 1965.

Moreover, the international context in which the Black civil rights movement took place should be examined. U.S. imperialism was locked in deadly struggle with millions of colonial people also fighting for the most fundamental human rights. The U.S. imperialist war against the Vietnamese, for example, was carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy."

But the racism directed against Blacks in capitalist America gave the lie to this rationalization for justifying the unmitigated repression directed against the Vietnamese freedom struggle. Capitalists were divided because of the conflict between their domestic and foreign policy.

Civil disobedience was a dramatic component of the mass civil rights struggle, but not its most powerful expression. The ruling class was forced to make concessions on civil rights because they were faced with potential social upheavals led by the urban Black masses. In that sense, the P-9 unionists, like Blacks in the 1960s, had to raise the stakes considerably before

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accentuate their differences or rather, trying

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P.9 STRIKE okt Trilom