National Guard Closes Hormel’s Plant

AUSTIN, Minn. —  Hundreds of National Guardsmen in riot gear shut down the strife-torn Geo. A. Hormel & Co. meat plant here early Tuesday morning to prevent violence after a crowd of several hundred striking workers gathered outside the plant’s gates to protest the company’s efforts to resume production with non-union workers.

But there was confusion late Tuesday over whether the National Guard, operating under the control of local law enforcement authorities, would help the plant to reopen this morning.

A Hormel official vowed that production would resume today with non-union workers, and claimed that the National Guard would help the firm get its employees into the plant this morning.

“This was just a temporary interruption; we will operate this plant,” said Deryl Arnold, general manager of the Hormel plant here. “We will reopen tomorrow.” Arnold refused to say how many employees the firm has hired since it began taking applications for replacement workers last week.

Mayor Opposes Reopening

Austin Mayor Tom Kough later denied, however, that the city or the guard had agreed to help Hormel reopen, and warned that conditions in Austin were still so tense that he would oppose any company efforts to resume production today.

“Mr. Arnold does not have any control over the guard,” said Kough, who is a striking Hormel worker as well as mayor. “And as I see it right now, that gate should stay closed for some time.”

Union leaders, meanwhile, protested that guardsmen would become nothing more than a “private police force” for Hormel if they start to help the firm bring in non-union workers today.

Meanwhile, in Ottumwa, Iowa, hundreds of union workers at a Hormel plant there ignored threats of dismissal and refused to cross a picket line set up by a caravan of strikers from the plant in Austin.

And in another development, a chartered helicopter ferrying an ABC News crew from Minneapolis-St.Paul to cover the Austin strike crashed in dense fog near Ellendale, in southern Minnesota, killing all three persons aboard. The dead were Joe Spencer, a correspondent in ABC’s Chicago bureau, his producer, Mark McDonough, and their pilot, Curtis Mark Haugen of Odyssey Helicopter Service Inc., of White Bear Lake, Minn.

About 800 Minnesota Army and Air National Guards troops have moved into Austin since Monday night, called out to preserve order by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich after local law enforcement officials in this south-central Minnesota town told him they could no longer handle the situation.

Hormel officials initially called on the governor to bring in the troops so that the company could transport its strike-breaking workers in and out of the plant peacefully. Hormel sought the state protection after a company photographer reportedly was kicked Monday while taking pictures of striking workers. “We felt yesterday, there was a time when the local law enforcement officials lost control of the situation,” said Arnold of Hormel.

Guardsmen lined up shoulder to shoulder around the plant Tuesday morning, but when the crowd of union supporters outside the main gate grew to approximately 300 people, the company and local law enforcement officials agreed to keep the facility closed, and the guardsmen, unarmed but outfitted with batons and riot gear, blockaded the gate for the rest of the day.

The bitter strike of Hormel’s 1,500 workers here has idled the highly automated pork-slaughtering and processing plant since Aug. 17. No new contract talks are scheduled.

Pay and Safety Issues

Local P-9 President Jim Guyette says the company has not budged from its demand that union workers take an immediate pay cut, from $10.69 to $10 an hour. He charged that the firm also wants to weaken the union’s grievance and arbitration procedures, and has failed to address serious safety hazards in the plant.

The union leader says the Austin facility has the highest incidence of work-related injuries of any meatpacking plant in the nation.

“People don’t strike for five months over 69 cents,” said Guyette. “We’re asking for a safe place to work.”

An intra-union battle complicates the Hormel dispute. Details in Business.