Ahmed A. White, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado School of Law, writing in “The Depression Era Sit-Down Strikes and the Limits of Liberal Labor Law,” 40 Seton Hall L. Rev. 1 (2010) (available online here) avers that the sit-down strike was relatively uncommon in American labor relations until the 1930s. He attributes part of the cause for this new aggression on the part of workers to the change in the status of labor rights. He notes:
Until the New Deal, basic labor rights were all but completely denied to workers by an array of legal doctrines that served the needs of anti-union employers, including the widespread use of injunctions, the enforcement of anti-radical statutes, the discriminatory enforcement of everyday criminal laws, and of course the absence of any laws of consequence affirmatively protecting labor rights.”
Then in 1932 Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, outlawing yellow-dog contracts (pledges by workers not to join a labor union) and significantly limiting the ability of employers to use federal court injunctions to undermine labor rights. Professor White also cites the importance of the passage in 1933 of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). This radical legislation required companies to write industry-wide “codes of fair competition” for the protection of consumers, competitors, and employers. It effectively fixed prices and wages, established production quotas, and imposed restrictions on entry of other companies into the alliances. Employees were given the right to organize and bargain collectively and could not be required, as a condition of employment, to join or refrain from joining a labor organization.
Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska and Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York, the chief sponsors of the Norris-LaGuardia Act
Although the NIRA was rather rapidly found unconstitutional in A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495, 1935), it still, along with the Norris-LaGuardia Act, “created a sense of overall change in labor’s legal condition and helped trigger an upsurge in labor-organizing efforts.”
It was in this charged atmosphere that the workers at the Austin, Minnesota Hormel meatpacking plant went on strike demanding recognition of their union, higher wages, and a safer workplace. The plant employed 2700 of the town’s 17,000 residents in 1933.
Larry Engelmann, in his history “We Were the Poor — The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor History, Fall, 1974, wrote of Hormel’s CEO:
Jay Hormel boasted brazenly in early 1933 that his unchallenged and unchecked power over the policies and personnel of George A. Hormel & Company packinghouse in Austin, Minnesota, was a ‘benevolent dictatorship.’ Laborers for the Hormel Company conceded that Hormel’s rule was dictatorial, but they disagreed with his use of the adjective ‘benevolent.’ More often the term ‘sheer tyranny’ was used often by workers to describe their take on Hormel’s labor policies within the giant meatpacking plant.”
Jay Hormel in 1938
Jay’s father George, who founded the company, was a different man altogether, often laboring alongside his workers. Engelmann informs us that George, who came from the same humble origins as many of his workers, was friendly and open with them, and receptive to their grievances. After an unfortunate incident involving the embezzlement of over a million dollars by one of his officers, however, George delegated significant control over the company to his son Jay, having Jay completely replace him when he retired in 1929.
Jay had a relatively privileged and sheltered childhood, and neglected to develop humility or empathy along the way. Jay’s tenure as the director of the company was further impaired by the onset of the Great Depression. Moreover, as Engelmann observed, “[Jay] Hormel successfully surrounded himself with a corps of unusually insensitive and often narrow-thinking foremen and straw bosses who seemed to take particular delight in attempting periodically to damage the self respect and sense of security of company laborers.”
Conditions for workers continued to deteriorate, and they tried work stoppages and other direct action techniques in an effort to force Hormel to agree to their demands. After Hormel attempted to bring scabs in to replace the workers, the sit-down strike began.
Workers striking at Hormel Packing Plant, Austin, 1933, via Minnesota Historical Society
On November 8, members of the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW), formed that July, presented Hormel with five demands. Hormel replied to them in an open letter on November 10, 1933, basically claiming the company couldn’t afford to concede them. A strike was called that evening; work was suspended by most but not all workers; and picket lines organized. Engelmann reports:
Hormel worried about the twenty million pounds of meat he believed was spoiling on racks inside the plant and the massive $500,000 refrigeration system itself that was threatened. The pipes of the refrigeration system would freeze solid and burst within twenty-four hours unless the dynamos were turned back on.”
Strike at Hormel Packing Plant, Austin. Photograph by the St. Paul Daily News, 1933
Minnesota State Governor Floyd B. Olson, a member of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, refused to send in the National Guard to break up the strike, as Hormel requested. Instead, he offered to take the lead in an arbitration. He managed to work out a compromise, with both sides agreeing to submit their problems to arbitration by the State Industrial Commission.
On November 13, 1933, this day in history, workers thus ended their labor action three days after it began.
On December 4, 1933, in accordance with a ruling by the State Industrial Commission, workers received an increase in wages, although less than the raises originally demanded. The Hormel Company made only minor concessions, Englemann argued, since the increases were in line with those that went into effect throughout the meatpacking industry that autumn.
Nevertheless, as the Encyclopedia of US. Labor and Working-class History, Volume 1 by Eric Armesen notes, the success of the Hormel strike “caught the imaginations of thousands of other workers,” and direct actions by workers to improve conditions and compensation spread around the country.
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